52 replies to this topic

[hmtinc]

well , since 10.8 is coming out and apple is introducing the all new notification center.

I think its time the porting team got its own mac osx app . In which we can launch and sign-in with our accounts and get direct notifications on to our desktop or apple bar .
and the app could also contain a downloader so you can browse the portdb from your mac instead of logging on to the website.
There also could be a quick port sumbit section where you can submit a port the moment you finish it

and for port backups there could be a torrent downloader


I would help make a app  . If the idea goes trough

[Demondays1]

wouldnt this take a lot of coding?

[hmtinc]

Demondays1, on 21 April 2012 - 10:09 PM, said:

wouldnt this take a lot of coding?

I don't know what your definition of a lot is .
But  it would take at least a Couple hundred lines of code though
But of you have like 3 or 4 people on the project .
The project shouldnt be hard.

[doh123]

if its your idea, then its your project... :-)

[wMin17]

Just use fluid

[hmtinc]

wMin17, on 22 April 2012 - 02:14 AM, said:

Just use fluid

No i am talking about a fully integrated app .. that will work with push notifications on mac osx

[wMin17]

ooooo.  Now that will be difficult!

[eridani]

Make it compatible with OSX 10.6 pls =P

[bloodfang42]

I'd love an app! I cant code for my life, but if you got some people who could help you, that would be awesome.

[KGameLover1]

You think I want a notification every time people quote my posts?

(And this is just in the course of three hours!)

eridani, on 22 April 2012 - 09:04 PM, said:

Make it compatible with OSX 10.6 pls =P

10.6 won't have Notification Center, nor will 10.7.

[syao]

Notification Center requires the app to be in the MAS as far as I know.

But there still is Growl which works well on 10.6 and 10.7, and when 10.8 comes out will probably become some sort of bridge for non-MAS apps to post stuff in the Notification Center.

Anyways, if anyone wants to start this project, feel free to I guess (unless the other admins have different plans).  I do not have the kind of time required to start a new project right now.
If the project starts and develops well, maybe we can get some APIs ready - or expose part of the IPB APIs to fully integrate the app with the site.

(Also, how come nobody has suggested an iOS app yet?)

[bloodfang42]

hmmmmm I think an ios app would be better, just cuz its accessibility that Im interested in.

[hmtinc]

syao, on 24 April 2012 - 12:07 AM, said:

Notification Center requires the app to be in the MAS as far as I know.

But there still is Growl which works well on 10.6 and 10.7, and when 10.8 comes out will probably become some sort of bridge for non-MAS apps to post stuff in the Notification Center.

Anyways, if anyone wants to start this project, feel free to I guess (unless the other admins have different plans).  I do not have the kind of time required to start a new project right now.
If the project starts and develops well, maybe we can get some APIs ready - or expose part of the IPB APIs to fully integrate the app with the site.

(Also, how come nobody has suggested an iOS app yet?)

I guess cause there is already an ip.board app for iOS and who would pay for the $99 apple developer fee.
Thats why mac app sounds more reasonable cause its free to develop .
I am pretty sure by the time 10.8 comes out there will be away for non-mas apps to use notification centre.

Also since this app is trying to be more based upon push notification to your mac . It will have to be based upon 10.8  and since 10.8 is still buggy and i don't want to program in virtual box (not dual booting ) . This project won't start till 10.8 comes out and i can install the bug free version .

I can't guarantee a 10.6 or 10.7 app though .
unless some has magic code skills and wants to transfer our project code over to growl
but till then i can't guarantee a app for any os version lower then 10.8

EDit : just went over apple's dev resources and found out that notifications isn't just for Mas... Yay

[hmtinc]

KGameLover1, on 23 April 2012 - 11:54 PM, said:

You think I want a notification every time people quote my posts?

(And this is just in the course of three hours!)


10.6 won't have Notification Center, nor will 10.7.

Thats just sad.... i guess blinx doesn't have anything better to do
There should be block user button ... so you don't get notifications from one user

[BLACKNIGHT]

hmtinc, on 21 April 2012 - 09:50 PM, said:

well , since 10.8 is coming out and apple is introducing the all new notification center.

I think its time the porting team got its own mac osx app . In which we can launch and sign-in with our accounts and get direct notifications on to our desktop or apple bar .
and the app could also contain a downloader so you can browse the portdb from your mac instead of logging on to the website.
There also could be a quick port sumbit section where you can submit a port the moment you finish it

and for port backups there could be a torrent downloader


I would help make a app  . If the idea goes trough

i think it is a great idea but it would have to be 10.6.8 compatible because some people aka(me) don't like lion or mountain lion if is any thing like lion

[BLACKNIGHT]

but i would be willing to help you code the app

[syao]

hmtinc, on 24 April 2012 - 04:16 AM, said:

I guess cause there is already an ip.board app for iOS and who would pay for the $99 apple developer fee.

Well, I still haven't found a decent iOS app for IPB... the official one is MIA since IP.Board 3.1.x, and the unofficial apps I tried are just an ad-riddled bookmark to the mobile skin of the forums, with no additional features... so I ended up just bookmarking http://portingteam.com/index in the Home Screen...
But I see your point on the $99 - that would be different if one already had a developer subscription.

Quote

EDit : just went over apple's dev resources and found out that notifications isn't just for Mas... Yay

Ah, that's great then.  Things still weren't clear last time I looked for info (when ML DP1 came out)

[hmtinc]

So who wants to help?  

[Blinx 007]

What Would Mac 10.8 Include?

[hmtinc]

blinxfrost, on 25 April 2012 - 01:45 AM, said:

What Would Mac 10.8 Include?

Notification Center

[Demondays1]

so this 10.8 will be free soon for all users right?

[Battlefiler]

hmtinc, on 21 April 2012 - 09:50 PM, said:

well , since 10.8 is coming out and apple is introducing the all new notification center.

I think its time the porting team got its own mac osx app . In which we can launch and sign-in with our accounts and get direct notifications on to our desktop or apple bar .
and the app could also contain a downloader so you can browse the portdb from your mac instead of logging on to the website.
There also could be a quick port sumbit section where you can submit a port the moment you finish it

and for port backups there could be a torrent downloader


I would help make a app  . If the idea goes trough

i plan that since some months (it was an secret) the concept is finished (i only wait for an copy of the mysql database)

ps: the design is allready finished (if you can code with mysql you can help me)

ps2: it will have an updater and installer function

[HiPhish]

Demondays1, on 25 April 2012 - 03:49 AM, said:

so this 10.8 will be free soon for all users right?

No one knows. Major updates have never been free, but then again it's not even a year since Lion, so who knows?

[syao]

Battlefiler, on 25 April 2012 - 09:55 AM, said:

i plan that since some months (it was an secret) the concept is finished (i only wait for an copy of the mysql database)

Erm, a copy of the MySQL database? And what would that be for? It's not like you can connect to the MySQL database from clients (and, even if that was possible, i.e. the MySQL not firewalled, that would be very poor design - it would potentially give out our database access credentials to everyone downloading the app, since they would need to be embedded in it).

In other words, a client app does NOT need to know how things are stored in the DB, and it doesn't even need to know things are in a database.  Connections to the DB are firewalled and can happen only between the webserver and the db server.  Connections to the DB are dangerous, since a lot of stuff IPB uses is cached, and it cannot be accessed directly, even if it was possible to.

All we can do here is to use some API to let the app interact, and there currently isn't a safe one to use (the default IPB API doesn't seem good for a client app), so we have to write it.  To do so, I need to know exactly all the operations the app needs to do, since I have to come up with and write an API method for each of them.  The API will be something webservice-like, most likely using XML (SOAP) through HTTP.

[Battlefiler]

thank you for the reply.

ok the problem is the security. Devilhunter said that an app probably can access the database (i think he have not much knowledge about that)

ps: is there not an save way to access the database ? The other method is very hard to code

[syao]

No, there's no way to give direct access to the database to an app, for two reasons:
- We don't administrate the SQL server, so we cannot reconfigure its firewall
- The database is not meant to be accessed by untrusted clients, since its security model is based on a single-user (administrator) access system.  You would have to embed our own username and password in your app, and that would mean anyone can grab it and access our database (including members' passwords)

There is no other way, a custom HTTP-based API is the way to go.  And I suggested SOAP because it's pretty widespread and based on XML, which is very easy to parse, create and validate programmatically.

[DruidofLuhn]

You would need to access a database with SQL. I'm guessing that this website uses a databases (how could it not?).

The app would therefore need to log in to it like the website does to retrieve the new posts and stuff, or it could somehow log in to the website as the user and be able to find out whether any new ports have been made (watching the "newest ports") and check for notifications too.

Could you not encrypt the database credentials (if using one).

And about mentions and all that, if this ever works (would be good to develop with Growl too) then what to display could be changed through Preferences.

[syao]

DruidofLuhn, on 25 April 2012 - 12:53 PM, said:

You would need to access a database with SQL. I'm guessing that this website uses a databases (how could it not?).

It does (MySQL in our case), but that's not necessarily true (there are non-SQL databases around, you know).

Quote

The app would therefore need to log in to it like the website does to retrieve the new posts and stuff, or it could somehow log in to the website as the user and be able to find out whether any new ports have been made (watching the "newest ports") and check for notifications too.

Yes, it would need to login to the website - not to the database.  By logging in to a database, the app would be able to see and edit everything that's in it, which isn't what we want.  We need to provide it a way to only see and be able to edit the stuff each member is authorized to see and edit.

Quote

Could you not encrypt the database credentials (if using one).

Wat?  Database credentials (encrypted or not) in a public client?  No way it's going to happen.

[Battlefiler]

is it possible that the admin (from the mysql database) mirror the orginal database to an other website (mirror all 1 hour something like this).

then the app could access to this database

[doh123]

You cannot add a read-only user to the database?

I know if its like my website, my database is hosted on a different machine and its not even accessible to outside machines from the web.  I have to ssh into my server then I can access the database server from my server, but not from anything outside the network... which makes 3rd party apps using it directly impossible, and much more secure.

You could add some features to the website... hidden pages that display tons of information in XML format, whatever is needed for a specific case from the App, so the app could get that data it needs from the web server supplying it.