Can apps reference each other or work together? For example, if I am in ABContacts, which is my premiere contacts app, and I want to send someone a birthday card with hiCard, is this possible? I guess what I am asking, as I know that it's not currently possible, but can a developer link to another developers' app? Thanks!
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Apps Work Together?
- Thread starter jmccray
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I would love to be able to do stuff like this. There are so many apps currently that could work very well together if they were able to "communicate" with each other. However, due to Apple's policy of apps not being able to run in the background, this won't happen. Once an app is closed, it's closed. There may be something in the jailbreaking community to help with this though.
The developers would have to work together to send the information to an outside server so both apps can access the data.
Not necessarily. Suppose you have a document in one of those file storing apps (like Briefcase), but this app cannot e-mail it. Wouldn't it be great if another email app was able to access that file from the file storing app and then email it? Or, if you downloaded a file from the internet with an app like iDownload, but you wanted to then edit this document. It would be great if a program that could edit documents could grab the doc from iDownload and then edit it.
Yes necessarily. One app can not talk to another app directly on the device. They need to send their data to an outside place (like their web server) then have the 2nd app pull that data off the server to be able to use it.
No, you're misunderstanding me. You are talking about a way apps could be able to communicate within the confines of the current SDK. I am talking about a hypothetical situation where Apple would actually loosen-up and allow background running apps. In order to copy a document from one app and transfer it to another, you sure as heck wouldn't need to have it first sent to a remote server and then have it downloaded from another app. It could all be done locally. But, with the current SDK, Apple does not allow this to happen. What you describe is a work-around using the current SDK.
You never specified that you wanted it to be done within the confines of the SDK locally. Right now, there is a way for apps to talk to each other, that is by talking to an external server. All Apple needs to do is allow developers to write to a common area, no need for background apps.
Oh well. That would be awesome if an app could write to a common area (just we do for saved photos) that could be used by any app on the iPhone. This would make the iPhone much better. I really unsure why they didn't make a common for saving documents. Maybe this is what they aim to do with their fee-based iWork website - make an area of the cloud your common area.
Applications already have the ability to communicate with each other without the need for any external servers or anything, with some limitations. An app can support the use of URLs to allow external apps to send them information. So in the original example, hiCard would just need to support a particular URL format (and publicly publish it) for sending cards (e.g. hicard:newcard&sendto=mom). Then ABContacts could build in support for this type of URL to allow it to send data to hiCard.
Apps have no access to data outside of its own sandbox unless it is the devices address book or photo album.
Nothing I said in my post is incorrect. You can pass actual data as part of the URL. This does not involve one application reading files inside the sandbox of another. There may be some limit to the length of a URL which will limit the amount of data you can send, but it would work fine for the OP's example.