I need a recommendation for some image hosting with a fancy web-interface for uploading pics and an API (or even better — an iOS SDK) to get those photos in a mobile app.
I'm aware of that question: Need recommendation for image hosting with API access. However, I don't need any image-uploading API, what I need is a way to populate galleries of photos to my iOS app users: upload the pics through a web interface, and then be able to retrieve all of them in the app. So there shouldn't be any user authentication in the mobile app, and the photos are meant to be public.
I'm looking into several flickr iOS API libraries, but I'm not sure if any of them can be used without user authentication — e.g. by anonymously pulling the galleries of some specific app-hardcoded user (me). Or maybe I'm overthinking and there's another suitable solution that I'm missing?
Any help is highly appreciated!
Ok, it turned out that Flickr is more or less the thing I needed — it obviously has a nice web-interface for managing your photos, and there are a bunch of components to access these galleries on iOS device (for instance, https://github.com/devedup/FlickrKit and https://github.com/lukhnos/objectiveflickr). Moreover, you don't need to log in to access publicly available photo sets and collections, so I decided to go for this option.
I am not sure if you would like to host this image hosting service by yourself.
if you don't, then you can take a look at ImageS3, https://github.com/images3/images3-play.
An open and free image hosting service run on top of Amazon S3. It is like other cloud image hosting service which provides REST api, web interface admin console.
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I'm searching a way to make a social network where the data (images, videos...) is stored on the user's computer (or client-side) and a remote server is used to access it by serving the functionnality and the design. The basic thing would be for each user to have a profile and to be able to browse other's profiles.
Note : It's not a problem if the client-side computer shuts down its machine. The user's profile would be just designed as offline. And when the user is connected, others would be able to browse his – her profile.
I searched a lot and I came up with different ideas :
→ store data with indexeddb and then stream it with webrtc. The problem : webrtc is not really made for showing a simple profile page to be browsed by multiple users.
→ make a desktop app to access local files and then try to make a communication with the server to deliver the app (with something like electron ?). The problem is I don't know if electron is well suited for this kind of project.
Any ideas, questions, suggestions, remarks or anything that helps would be greatly welcomed.
We have an application which i a Cloud Screen service/application. The purpose of the application is to store images and videos locally but also on the server. So if a computer connects to the network, it'll download the current content (json, images, videos) so it can display these even without internet because it's stored locally.
The client was made in Electron and the management application was .NET Core.
If you're thinking about creating a desktop application, then yes, it is possible, but in order to achieve this, you have to store on the server as well.
Let's assume that someone wants to check your profile. It has to load your datas which has to be stored on the server because they can't access your local files and computer. But you can store your files locally to boost up the speed.
I would only recommend this to store images/videos and bigger files, but you have to specify your requirements because in this case, every time you bump into a new content, you have to download it (if you want to store locally so it'll load faster the stored files).
The second option is to store these in the client. But be aware, desktop application's size can increase easily with lots of images and videos. If you store these in the client, you only have to store the URLs in case of dynamic datas (static URLs can be stored as static data).
I hope I could help, if you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
I am developing an iOS application (to be deployed on the App Store) that requires content updates on a weekly basis.
I understand that the best way to achieve this would be to use a server, where the app would query for new data and download responses in JSON. However I am not knowledgeable when it comes to HTML, PHP or MySQL and therefore am endeavoring to find an alternative.
Here's an idea: using Dropbox to substitute for a server backend. My app connects to one central Dropbox account, checks for new files, and downloads them if present.
Is this idea feasible? If not, are there any alternatives?
Dropbox cannot be a dependable substitute for your server/backend for following reasons:
Dropbox uses OAuth for authentication, which needs user interaction. You do not want your app users to go through Dropbox authentication with your 'common' credentials.
Users who have a Dropbox account or the app installed, will most likely use their own credentials to login which completely breaks your flow.
Drobox, although a good way of sharing and syncing files is not meant for more meaningful data like web services etc or user/database interaction etc. Just syncing JSON file may suffice your app's needs for now but from a long term perspective you want a proper back end.
As suggested in the comment by #tkanzakic you can use one of the substitution services if you don't want to get too technical on the backend.
I am pretty late to the party, but this is possible and not necessarily a stupid idea (though this depends on what you need). You might want to have a look at remote storage for example, which allows you to use Dropbox among other providers as backend.
For sure, you can use the Dropbox Sync API to achieve this (https://www.dropbox.com/developers/sync).
I'm developing an application which lets users upload pictures. I'd like to use Google cloud services to store these pictures. I am creating a unique GUID for each image in database and would like to store the images in the cloud with that name. It makes sense for me to make an ajax request for a GUID and then upload the image from the same page directly to google cloud services.
https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/storage-getting-started-javascript/blob/master/index.html
Like shown in this example.
My first question is, should I be sending this to my back-end(C# code) and uploading it from there? Or is this the correct approach?
And my second question if this is the correct approach is, wouldn't exposing my details like that in javascript allow other people to upload from outside my application as well?
An API key, by itself, identifies a call as being associated with a certain project for purposes of billing. It's only necessary for anonymous calls. An API key does not grant any sort of authorizations. If there's an object in a bucket in your project that only your project members can see, the API key won't give anyone permission to read it.
That said, it's not a great idea to share your API key if you can help it, and if you need to share it, you should lock it down as much as possible. API keys can be limited to use with only certain IP addresses, only with certain web referrers (for instance, it will only work with JavaScript clients on www.yoursite.com), or only when run from a particular iPhone or Android app. These precautions aren't cryptographically fool-proof (there's no reason a hacker couldn't spoof a referer header), but they do make them pretty much useless for someone else who just wants to paste an API key somewhere to enable a web app and doesn't want to pay for it themselves.
The problem with using the javascript client's approach for your application is that individual users would either end up uploading objects completely anonymously or with their own Google accounts. Neither is super great, since the anonymous option would basically require you to create a bucket with anonymous writes enabled, and you don't want to do that.
There is a great approach to letting users upload pictures, though: signed URLs. Signed URLs allow your server to securely sign, in advance, a request to upload an object with your credentials. This is your best option for letting anonymous end users securely upload objects to your buckets.
Documentation on signed URLs: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/accesscontrol#Signed-URLs
I a thinking of creating an iPhone/iOS app that would include a feature where one user could create a list of words and then save them to their account on a server. Also (and this is very important), the user could share their list with other users by giving them permission.
So my question is, how can I go about creating such a server? For right now, I have a home computer (running Windows XP that just stores data for my music system) which I can use to host the server. I am also open to the use of other online storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox (I can't remember if Amazon does anything like that). However (and I know this may complicate things a bit), but at least for now, I want/need to stick with free services/options.
Just to recap, the key features that I am looking for are:
create users/accounts (on the server)
eventually I may [try] to incorporate the use of other services to log users in like with their email account, OpenId, etc.
the ability to access (log in to) the server (with credentials) from my app
the ability to send/receive data between the server and my app
the ability to share data between users
I know this is a lot to ask for, but if anyone has any suggestions or can get me going in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.
The basic setup would be as follows:
Backend: Database (MySQL), Web server (Apache), with server side scripting (PHP).
Client: iOS device with developed app.
Communication: use HTTP client/server model, communicating with something like JSON.
This is much the same setup as a web server, but instead of serving html/css/javascript etc the results will be JSON.
As far as implementing specifics such as login in, and sharing data between users, this is purely dependent on your implementation. This is not trivial, and not something that can be easily stated in a single post.
Hope this helps.
You could build your own webservice in PHP, Ruby or Python. If you do so I would recommend building a RESTful webservice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) and then use RestKit (http://restkit.org/) to handle the data in the iOS app. Especially RestKit's CoreData integration is nice in my opinion.
Another solution would be using a service like Parse (https://parse.com/products/data). The first million or so requests per month are free but after that it could get pricy. I personally have not tried it so I couldn't tell you if it is any good.
I want to put the Twitter service on my server and customize it for my purpose. I have no idea how it works.
My goal is to communicate to your own Twitter server rather than the original twitter server and serve my purpose.
You should check out: StatusNet. It is an open source micro blogging platform. From their site, you can download the source and deploy it on your own server. Once you have it installed you can customize it to your liking.
Twitter isn't an Open Source project - they don't provide their server code.
From my experience at another company deploying very widely distributed systems, the chances are there's a bucket-load of infrastructure you'd need to get running first - complete overkill for a single-server solution, but vital for a global service with many millions of users. In other words, even if Twitter did provide their code, it probably wouldn't be an appropriate solution for your situation.
The actual Twitter (twitter.com) service is proprietary, you can't run it yourself.
There are plenty of open source twitter clones out there. The more general name is "microblogging". Pinax for example has basic microblogging. Try searching google for 'open source microblogging' for other projects.
I don't believe the Twitter platform is freely available to the general public. If you want to make your own "Twitter server", you're going to have to clone the service yourself.
You can't run Twitter on your own server, but you can write your own application that talks to Twitter through Twitter's API.
It all depends on what you mean by "customizing" Twitter. There are many applications like Twitpic and TweetDeck that are built "on top of" Twitter. They add their own functionality while leaving Twitter to do the "heavy lifting".
For example, I have written a personal project for moderating a stream of tweets. This application runs on my local server, but it gets its data by querying Twitter's API.
There are two main advantages to extending rather than rebuilding Twitter:
It takes a lot less effort because you can reuse all the basic functions of Twitter
You can take advantage of Twitter's huge user base. Even if you succeeded in cloning Twitter, it would be far less interesting than the original because Twitter works by strength of numbers.
You could use Wordpress and get the twitter developer add in then get a api code from them and there users can use your site and vice versa also apps for twitter will work for your site.
Wow. That's a highly ambitious request that you have there. Twitter isn't like Wordpress, there's no .org version that can be downloaded and run locally. Twitter is a highly scalable service that is designed to run on large scale servers.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news to you on this.