Here is a question I am facing. I would like to offer my users a way for checking the sanity of a given URL, inside an iOS app.
We all know when we surf on the internet, that not all sites are clean of viruses, malware or other ill-intended beasts. As much as possible we want to avoid these places. So when a user types in a URL, or gets it via some other means, she/he may want to run some checking.
I have done some research on the subject and found out VirusTotal that seems to be a possible solution to use. I already know that someone will come up and say that the question of choosing between VirusTotal and MalwarePartial is not fit for this site, because dependant on opinions or preferences. But I do not intend to ask about VirusTotal or anyone else in particular. I only want to know if there is a standard way or best practice for this task: checking the sanity of a URL in an iOS app.
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I’m no new user of Apple products, but I am brand new to coding and automation on iPhone. I’ve created an automation that does something at a specific time of day, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten because there’s limited settings they offer without me coding anything in. I’m trying to change a specific setting in the settings app “Notifications->(App)->turn notifications off” but I’m not sure how, or even if it’s possible to do, outside of what’s already programmed in. Thanks in advance, if anyone figures it out and lends a hand. (Edit: I would automate Do Not Disturb because that seems like the simple answer, but long story short, I don’t want anyone to see banners of messages and read my texts without my phone unlocked, and Do Not Disturb doesn’t do that as far as I’m aware.)
I'am creating a new feature for my iOS app. After I publish the app I wants to show the new feature only for 50% of the users, so I can do some testing which version makes more orders. I have no idea how to do it without using some third parties like Optimizely.
Also is it possible to do this using Google Tag Manager(GTM).
So can someone please help me to figure this out.
Thank you very much for your time.:)
It’s hard to do it on your own, though not impossible of course: Optimizelys of the world are just programs. You’ll need to solve these problems:
Targeting: Some algorithm that will assign user session to either control or (one of) treatment(s). This has to be random, of course, or you may as well stop there.
Routing: Send sessios to the targeted experience.
Logging: You’ll need to intelligently log events from sessions as they traverse their targeted experience. These may be many, so be careful not to add latency to your app path. Your statistical analysis will be based on these.
Experience stability: how do you ensure (if you do) that a returning user sees the same experience he’s already seen.
Note as well, that Optimizely will only help you if all your changes are on the device and not on the server. If you need to instrument server changes as well, you’ll have to look into Sitespect or Variant.
I finally figured out how to do the A/B testing with 'Google Tag Manager'(GTM).
In GTM you can create a variable called 'Google Analytics Content Experiment'. With this variable you can select how many percentage of users going to see each Variation(your experiments). You can create up to 10 variations for single experiment.
GTM is so cool and powerful. GTM contains so many features that could save lot of time and I totally recommend it for anyone who is going to do A/B testing.
Is it possible to make app not launchable if it has been cracked and installed from installous? I don't want to see my app in installous
It's not that easy and it not answerable within some words or code snippets.
But you might check this:
http://www.shmoopi.net/ios-anti-piracy/iphone-piracy-protection-code-tutorial-2/
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/7667
http://thwart-ipa-cracks.blogspot.com/2008/11/detection.html
The read also here:
http://www.learn-cocos2d.com/2010/05/ignore-everything-youve-heard-about-app-store-piracy/
There are ways to detect whether your app is running on a jailbreaked device or whether your app has been modified (aka cracked). Take a look here and here for example.
From my point of view all you are getting by using these methods is a waste of time. Maybe you can make it harder for potential crackers and keep away the script kiddies. But you won't get that far that no talented cracker on earth would be unable to crack your app. Even one single cracker on earth who's able and motivated to crack your app is enough to upload it to hundred's of sites.
If really big companies fail at protecting their apps I really doubt that you will achieve it... so: wasted time which should be better spend on improving your app.
Probably not, because the part of cracking your application is to remove all restrictions (registration, detection of jailbreak, ...).
I've been scouring the SO board and google and can't find any really good recommendations for this. I'm building a Twilio application and the text-to-speech (TTS) engine is way bad. Plus, it's a pain in the ass to test since I have to deploy every time. Is there a significantly better resource out there that could render to a WAV or MP3 file so I can save and use that instead? Maybe there's a great API for this somewhere. I just want to avoid recording 200 MP3 files myself, would rather have this generated programatically...
Things I've seen and rejected:
http://www.yakitome.com/ (I couldn't force myself to give them my email)
http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm
http://www.panopreter.com/index.php (on the basis of crappy website)
Thinking of paying for this, but not sure yet: https://ondemand.neospeech.com/
Obviously I'm new to this, if I'm missing something obvious, please point it out...
I am not sure if you have access to a mac computer or not. Mac has pretty advanced tts built into the operating system. Apple spent a lot of money on top engineers to research it. It can easily be controlled and even automated from the command prompt. It also has quite a few built in voices to choose from. That is what I used on a recent phone system I put up. But I realize that this is not an option if you don't have a mac.
Another one you might want to check into is http://cepstral.com/ they have very realistic voices. I think they used to be open source but they are no longer and now you need to pay licensing fees. They are very commonly used for high end commercial applications. And are not so much geared towards the home user that wants their article read to them.
I like the YAKiToMe! website the best. It's free and the voices are top quality. In case you're still worried about giving them your email, they've never spammed me in many years of use and I never got onto any spam lists after signing up with them, so I doubt they sold my email. Anyway, the service is great and has lots of features for turning electronic text into audio files in different languages.
As for the API you're looking for, YAKiToMe! has a well-documented API and it's free to use. You have to register with the site to use it, but that's because it lets you customize pronunciation and voice selection, so it needs to differentiate you from other users.
First of all, I'm not a hacker :)
We're doing a project where we'll award points to users for visiting certain groups of sites.
Obviously there are major privacy concerns, but we have no interest in actually knowing where they've been, just as long as the program we create can check the history and through an algorithm, rank the site/user.
This would be a downloadable application and we'd tell the user how it worked, since transparency is vital.
Now, with that in mind, is there a way for a local program to access the Cache/History of a browser and make a list out of it?
I've read that Firefox uses SQLite to compile their History, which could potentially be parsed using Adobe AIR.
At the same time, Adobe AIR has access to the filesystem, so it could probably check if the usual IE temporary folders have any files stored. If so, try to read the URL they were downloaded from?
I know all of this sounds very dodgy, but try to keep an open mind :)
Thank you all for your help.
Not a full answer to your question, but you might be interested in the CSS History hack. If you already KNOW the sites you want to rank, you will be able to find out which sites the users visited.
Good thing you said something about a LOCAL program, because there are surely ways to read out the SQLite database from Mozilla and IE's history and you can find plenty of implementations using your favorite search engine.
Particularly easy to use are Nirsoft's utilities MozillaHistoryView and IEHistoryView which you could script to output CSV and parse that file afterwards.