I am building a very basic information based app (Android) for an event, and i'd greatly appreciate your help on the questions below.
Basically, the app will just contain information about the 7 guest speakers at the event.
The attendees (2500 android users) will only get the link to the Android app when they arrive at the venue.
There is no database connected to the app as it just contains static information about the speakers which is hard coded into the app, however i want to build in a small feature so that i can send out custom push notifications to all users (let's assume 2500) at various times, such as when a speak is about to start on stage etc.
QUESTIONS
01 - am i right in saying that Parse allows you to send out custom push notifications in bulk from the Parse dashboard?
02 - is it able to send to 2500 at one time or do they need to be sent out in smaller batches?
03 - at what stage do charges start to occur for all of these custom push notifications
Thanks in advance for your help, it's much appreciated.
01. Yes Parse dashboard enables you to send push notifications in bulk.
02. Yes it is able to send as many push notifications as needed you needn't worry about batches since Parse dashboard is a simple GUI frontend made by Parse.com so you don't do any coding.
03. You can see on this link https://parse.com/plans that per app you have 1 million unique pushes. Unique push is equal to 1 push on 1 device. To be clearer a single user might have 5 devices registered to him so sending a push to 1 user does not mean 1 push but 5 pushes 1 for each device.
**One more thing to note if you are going to be making custom pushes you should think about handling the push notification in the Android app if you plan on doing anything fancy. If its just to show the push with text then you need the basic handling of an incoming push that does nothing once the app is opened by a push notification.
Related
I am trying to introduce a messenger (chat) feature in my application.
I ma unable to figure out how to make the feature sync on multiple devices.
Let's say I am using the chat on my phone, and then I login to my desktop and start chatting there. How would I get the messages on both devices and how will both be in sync with each other. Additionally, for the sender to get a read confirmation, the message should be read from either one of the device, but the notification of unread should be shown on sender's device on which the message in unread unless he opens and reads it.
For First Part of the question you want to do Like FB Messenger where you loggin you will find your whole messages found not related to a device. To Achieve that you can have at the device app Last Login time which will be posted to the server, and all messages from that time will be retrieved to the user. But imagine the user has read all his messages from the mobile but he didnt open the computer since one Month. IF you didnt mark the message as read, he will find enourmous amount of messages coming as unread but he actually read on his mobile which will cause you huge usability issue.
For your Case I feel you need to do exaclty what FB Messenger does. Retrieve your latest messages from your conv with their actual status. And while scrolling up load by demand.
So Your Message will have only 1 Status(Read or UnRead) And date where you can match with Device Last Sync time.
I know there are a lot of questions related to this subject, but after searching I found out that they all say that if the app is closed then the only way is to fetch the notification again from the server once the app is opened or if the app is opened from the notification then you can handle it in didFinishWithLaunch but using WhatsApp, this is not the case...
I tried sending a message to phone B (which had whatsapp closed), Phone B received the notification. Then I turned off the internet on Phone B and opened the app and still received the chat message.
Can anyone guide me on how to do this?
Probably you should use one of background modes - "remote-notification".
After enabling it, you can send push with payload like
{
"alert": "",
"badge": "0",
"content-available": 1,
"sound": ""
}
if you specify content-available key equal 1, iOS will wake your app and call application:didReceiveRemoteNotification:fetchCompletionHandler: in app delegate and you have some time to proceed push and prepare app (like download this new message to device). Here is Apple docs link with info about push payloads.
However please be aware that this push delivering is not guaranteed. Apple tells
(Newsstand apps are guaranteed to be able to receive at least one push with this key per 24-hour window.)
In our experience you likely receive it most of the time, but not always. For example app delegate callback will not be called if user swiped to close your app.
Also you need to finish execution in 30 seconds or less and call the block in handler parameter (you can check discussion section of method documentation for more details)
I am developing an app in windows phone where I enter the score of the match and the other windows phone users who has the same app should get that score as a toast notification(if any other better way suggest me).
I also want to push the data to this app users from a rss feed. This feed gets refreshed data for every 1 or 2 mins.
IS this possible to implement this in windows phone ?
If you only want to send the notification of the match score to certain users then you could use Push Notifications.
If everyone needs to get the notification then you would just use a BackgroundAgent. The Background agent will run approximately every 30 minutes (if you need it to be more accurate then you're back to Push Notifications). When the agent runs you could just check to see if there are any new match scores since the time the agent last ran and then pop the toast if there are.
You should also use the Background Agent for checking your RSS feed.
I'm testing out Windows Phone 7.5 push notifications. I have got the 3 different push types working fine (Toast, Tile and Raw) and am able to send messages from unit tests and a web application without any problems and receive them in my WP application. I want the ability to add extra properties to the push notification and the Raw push type does this perfectly for me and I can add custom key/value pairs or anything else to the push message and extract it on the phone app. I have just found out however that it only works if the application is running and my unit tests fail (suppressed notification status is received in unit test) when the phone application is not running (checked documentation which confirms this too). Is there anyway to add extra properties (key/values) to toast or tile messages or some way I can use raw in another way ? Toast notifications seem limited to a title property and an actual message property but I need to add additional data.
Just wondering if anyone had any suggestions / workarounds ?
The general practice I use is to initially send a raw notification to the device with phone-usable data embedded in the message. If my application is currently running then I can process the contents of the raw message and immediately make use of it on the phone. However if the application is not currently running on the phone you will receive notification from the push servers that the message could not be delievered. If I receive this response I send out a Toast / Tile notification.
With Toast notifications the only parametrisation you have access to is the URI that will launch the application. This is specified with the wp:param node of the message. Eg.
<wp:Notification xmlns:wp="WPNotification">
<wp:Toast>
<wp:Text1>Toast Title</wp:Text1>
<wp:Text2>Toast sub title</wp:Text2>
<wp:Param>/MainPage.xaml?LaunchedFrom=A%20Toast%20Notification</wp:Param>
</wp:Toast>
</wp:Notification>
If the user taps on this toast notification your application will launch and navigate to MainPage.xaml. You can access the querystring passed in via the NavigationContext.QueryString.
Note: The wp:Param node can only be sent to Mango (and up) devices. Additionally the entire contents must be less than 256 characters or you'll receive a PushErrorTypeMessageBadContent error. (Thanks to Ritch Melton for pointing this out). More info available from the Sending Push Notifications for Windows Phone page on MSDN.
As you've discovered, the Microsoft Push Notification Service is very strict in what types of messages you can send and receive. The intent of these push notifications is to provide simple push updates and not large amounts of data. The flexible Raw type seems like it would fit the bill until you discover that:
You can use a raw notification to send information to your application. If your application is not currently running, the raw notification is discarded on the Microsoft Push Notification Service and is not delivered to the device.
However, if you send a toast notification to your application, when the user clicks on the toast the application is started. When your application starts, you should check a service and retrieve the data you are trying to send from a web-service or other remote mechanism.
I have tried googling for this and came up empty. What I want is a tutorial or example code of how to change my icon on the windows phone like the people application or SMS. For example when you get a new SMS message it puts a number next to the face in the icon. Is there any way for me to do that in my app?
You need to send a Tile Push Notification.
This allows you to update the image, text and (optionally) a number.
Push notifications shoudl be triggered from a remote [web] service.
You can also have the tile update periodically using a ShellTileSchedule.
You can update your application's Tile using Push Notifications from a web service registered with a Microsoft Push Notification Service. However, this isn't absolutely necessary. You can even update your tiles without push notifications, by setting a ShellTileSchedule. The minimum update interval is 1 hour, however.
See here.