Building apps that play nicely with other apps

Given at the NYC CocoaPods meetup ("Cocoa Kucha") on November 20, 2013.

Transcript

1. Building apps that play nicely with other apps Bryan Irace
2. Intents Contracts
3. …URLs?
4. URLs have shortcomings Like manually, explicitly defining all interactions between apps
5. We can fix some of these shortcomings • Documentation ! • Discovery
6. We can fix some of these shortcomings • Time spent writing client code ! • Bugs
7. CocoaPods
8. It’s OK to be selfish Provide code that helps others integrate with you
9. Tumblr iOS SDK github.com/tumblr/ TMTumblrSDK
10. x-callback-url.com [scheme]://x-callback-url/ [action]?[x-callback parameters]&[action parameters] Used in Byword, Drafts, Instapaper, Google Maps, Google Chrome, TextExpander, and many more
11. Please actually implement the “callback” part
12. URLs tumblr://x-callback-url/blog? blogName=bryan&postID=43724939726 ! tumblr://x-callback-url/text? title=Title&body=Body&tags=gif&tags=lol Hope others both find and properly implement them
13. + (void)viewBlog:(NSString *)blogName; ! + (void)createTextPost:(NSString *)title body:(NSString *)body tags:(NSArray *)tags success:(NSURL *)successURL cancel:(NSURL *)cancelURL; pod install TMTumblrSDK
14. UIActivityViewController
15. @implementation TMTumblrActivity ! - (NSString *)activityTitle { return @"Tumblr"; } ! - (UIImage *)activityImage { return [UIImage imageNamed:@"UIActivityTumblr"]; } ! - (void)performActivity { // Open Tumblr app or hit API directly } pod install TMTumblrSDK
16. UIDocumentInteractionController
17. + (UIDocumentInteractionController *)presentInteractionControllerWithURL:(NSURL *)URL caption:(NSString *)caption tags:(NSArray *)tags fromBarButtonItem:(UIBarButtonItem *)item { UIDocumentInteractionController *controller = [UIDocumentInteractionController interactionControllerWithURL:URL]; controller.UTI = @"com.tumblr.photo"; controller.annotation = @{ @"TumblrCaption" : caption, @"TumblrTags" : tags }; ! [controller presentOpenInMenuFromBarButtonItem:item animated:YES]; return controller; } pod install TMTumblrSDK
18. Publish an official API client Every app is different. Make it easy for developers to hit your API directly if they’d prefer.
19. Subspecs • TMTumblrSDK/URLSchemes ! • TMTumblrSDK/Activity ! • TMTumblrSDK/DocumentInteraction ! • TMTumblrSDK/APIClient • TMTumblrSDK/APIClient/Authentication Don’t make developers include more code than they want to
20. Summary You should make it easy for developers to integrate with your app ! Providing code via CocoaPods is obviously the best way to do so com/jobs