iOS Creating a User Manual for an App - ios

I need to add a User Manual for my App, although all the user manual examples I have seen are web-based, which is convienent because it allows you to update the documentation without updating the app but also inconvient if the user is in a off-line mode.
What I envision in a helpful usermanual would be a popovercontroller that would display relevant data to whatever the current view has. It would retrieve documentation from the web and save it for later reference. Maybe even something that could take a document and break it into a plist by tag. Including gaphics would be nice also.
Are there any frameworks do to this available? ..... Or am I going to have to write my own.
How have other people implemented user manuals?

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Priority of documents in elasticsearch

I have rails app witch collect mobile data and use elastic search as search engine in my app, As result that my app is very simple I use elastic as my db, every things goes fine till I found something amazing
In my case each user have two kind of document with different attributes, First one is profile that it's about user profile only and Second one is events that is user actions in mobile app. I have to say، user could update his/her profile and each user just have to one document in my system, that is about profile details. each time user update his profile I delete previous document and create new document for him but assume he send profile twice at same time unconsciously for example push register bottom twice at this point i get two document that are completely same so elastic save both but as i say i need to delete old one and create new one, I know I could handle this problem in mobile layer but I'm looking for some way witch make me sure at this situation document have their priorities.
Basically you need a versioning of your documents and using that you can control whether you need to create a new document or update existing document. this official Elasticsearch version control blog should help you design and implement this use-case.
I really hope I got your point correctly, consider the following points
prevent users from submitting twice in your front end.
update the document instead of deleting the previous one then creates a new document so that you don't have to worry about document priorities because of a single file.

How do I update my iOS app's content with background downloading?

TL;DR: I want to add images to the app over the internet through background downloading of some sort, but don't know where to start, or what the best method is.
My app displays images to the users which can be filtered etc. I have a "Cards" class that has fields for name, image, etc. I then have a huge area directly in my code where I create instances of the Cards class for each image. There is then an array of these class instances, which helps with displaying them.
My issue is that now I want to be able to update this block of class instances without having to push another build to the iTunes store. Essentially, I want to add "Cards" to the app (images with appropriate names and keywords associated with them). I need to be able to update the app every month (sometimes less) with new cards as quickly as possible.
I have heard suggestions here and there about JSON files and background downloading, but can't figure out which method I need for my situation.
As per my understanding you just want to update your app content in future without uploading a new build to App Store. Right ?
If you want to do so, make your app so flexible that you can show updated contents in your app.
Here is a short instruction which you can follow...
Develop an admin panel if you are aware of any backend scripting language like php. And you can add contents from this panel into your database.
Create an API which will fetch the content from your database
Make your app flexible so that it can show all the updated content getting from the API. If you have a list of content then you can use TableView/CollectionView with pagination.
If you still face any problem then let me know. I will see deep into your problem.

Where to save my iOS app's save files

I am learning iOS file system to store my game data like saving the amount of money earned and things like this in a xml file.
The question is where should I store them?
I read this: File System Basics
And I don't know that I should save data in Documents directory or Application Support directory.
Because the data I want to save is something that is not associated with user's documents and user will never see it so it should be in Application Support, but on the other hand it's something that is affected by user interactions so it should be in Documents.
I think it is the Application Support/MyGame as per the Apple Developer guide link shared by you. You are confused by the fact that it should not be something affected by user interaction. Actually it means user should not directly interact with these. See this from the link: File System Basics
Using something like Parse may slow down your app as it needs to interact with their server, but you do get a backup.
For something of this size, I'd use a mobile backend solutions provider like Parse or Firebase. Personally I use Parse in my projects and is very easy to implement advanced functionality into your apps like user registration/save data to users.
Hope this helps.

Anonymous contact form iOS app

I currently work at a school and have an idea to create an app that allows students to contact a grown up (for example, the principle) anonymously through an app. The app would quite simply consist of a contact form. I am trying to find out the best, and easiest way to achieve this without setting up servers with a separate API. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve it? Is there any way to set up an e-mail form with a pre set recipient and a built in sender-account? Please guide me in the right direction.
You would need to implement an SMTP client. You can use open source code like skpsmtpmessage
It's likely that their example app could be your solution.
Your biggest problem will be the deployment. You definitely need to pay an $99/y developer account and add all the students device ID's to your account (with a maximum of 100 devices/y) or register all of them as beta tester (I don't know the limitations).
Probably this isn't doable so easily, as it seems you don't have iOS developing experience so far. Maybe you can find something on the app store that works with self hosted databases. But you definitely need to host some kind of webApp/API.
You may want to give Appygram a try to handle the back-end if you are able to set up the contact form itself. While it's a separate hosted API, at least you don't have to build/manage it.
Appygram is a free web service that would allow you to configure all the details such as which adults could be contacted, their point(s) of contact (i.e. email address), and it would process and send all the submissions for you. All your app needs to do is send a form post request.
A nice thing about having this information outside of the iOS app itself is that you can change the contact details on the fly without requiring an update to the iOS app itself. Whether you use Appygram (which, since I contribute to it, I am slightly biased toward!) or something similar, I would say that since this is for students, I would recommend a solution that would allow you to update your configuration without requiring app updates.
Finally, I'd second what Julian said. The challenge here could be with deployment. One possible alternative would be to make this a mobile-friendly web page accessible only via student login or on the school network (or both). Would probably be easier development-wise and wouldn't require installs nor the hurdles that Julian described with device registration, etc. And, Appygram would still work with this setup as well.
Good luck!

iOS Cross Cutting Concerns

I have a Swift application i'm working on that allows a user to save various settings about their profile. Throughout my code, there are times where knowing these settings/preferences are important for the application's business logic. One of them is where the user works (their job, (which is a row in a sqllite database that has an ID as a primary key). The user is allowed to select one (and only one) in the app at any given time. Think of it like a profile - they can work many jobs, but only have one selected.
The following are scenarios where knowing the workplaceid profile is important:
In my sqllite database, retrieving work/shift information based upon the currently selected work ID(so not the ID from the database, but the ID they currently have selected). I'm passing this into my query.
In an NSDate extension function, when I go to determine some things about their starting date, I need to retrieve their currently selected profile, and use that for the calculation.
Within a particular view model when I want to show/hide certain fields.
On an alert view to show something related to their current workplace.
Now I think the quick and dirty way to do this is simply create a wrapper class to your nsuserdefaults in a utility class. Sure, all your info is stored in sqllite, but your currently selected app preferences are in nsuserdefaults since I can change this around (and it will change). This would parallel my other cross-cutting concerns such as logging/error handling, where I could use similar utility classes for all my work.
The fact that I might call this helper/utility class from every single layer of my application seems like a typical red flag you wouldn't do. Whether it's logging, or a user service to get information.
I'm curious to know what other people are doing in scenarios like this. When you need nsuserdefaults from all over your app, is the answer "eh who cares, just make a utility class and call it wherever you need it" ? Or is there a best practice others have followed with well-designed iOS apps? I know AOP is something folks tend to recommend. Does that have a place in iOS?
Thanks so much stackoverflow :)
The user is allowed to select one (and only one) in the app at any given time.
This tells me you want to create a singleton class. Every time you want to change the profile, you hit the singleton class and set it. That class encapsulates all the logic to get/set whatever you need, and the accessor functions. That's what I've been doing in my ObjC code for many years, and it has served me well. It's extremely easy to debug, and the rest of the code needs to know nothing about profile management (unless it's the UI part where you choose a profile).

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