andwang

What are voice lessons? Where would I be able to find them?

XMPP. Yes to persistence, but not in v1. Yes to presence indicator.

It will be iOS and Android for now, but we are adding Windows Phone/8 support if there is enough demand.

You are correct in that you would need to create your product and get your product approved. However, the product's associated content does not need to be approved. It is my understanding some App store (not necessarily Apple) in the future may require the content itself be reviewed.

When one of my apps was pirated a few years ago, I became extremely interested in iOS security. Based on my knowledge, I can vouch for the accuracy of the article you linked to.

The article explains quite well what IAP makes secure and what it does not. If you are using IAP to deliver content stored on Parse, Parse's SDK (and server code) makes this process very secure. The attack goes like this:

1) the attacker fakes receipt and sends it to Parse hoping that Parse will deliver the content, 2) Parse will send the receipt to Apple and ask if the receipt is valid and indeed for the product that is being requested, 3) Apple will acknowledge that this receipt is fake or for a product not being required, 4) Parse rejects the request, and no content is delivered. Success.

However, if you are using IAP to unlock features that are already shipped with the app, IAP does not prevent against binary manipulation attacks.

-Andrew

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I guess no, we don't have the support for these.

To satisfy my curiosity, are there a lot of indy newsstand developers? Wouldn't most newsstand apps be made by larger media companies?

Can you tell me what exactly you need for Newsstand? We support Newsstand pushes; what do you need on top of the newly added in-app purchases?

Officially we should not be commenting on iOS 6 given the non-disclosure nature of the preview. Maybe I can discuss what Parse offers that would be difficult for anyone else (Apple/Google/Amazon) to match:

1. iOS 4, iOS 5 compatibility. Today, the most common iOS development target platform is still iOS 4. Using Parse your in-app purchase will be able to work for the customers who are not on the newest iOS platform.

2. Attaching metadata for products. At Parse a lot of our customers want to attach metadata information to products (categories, authors, genres, the publishing date, actors, etc) and to query products based on this information. You can imagine this is a very handy feature for an app that sells comic books. This is very natural to do on Parse because Parse offers a query-able, key-value data store. In fact, anyone, with or without technical background, would be able to use the data browser to add the metadata to the Product class.

3. Hosting content on Parse requires no App Store review, thus introducing no delay/resubmission via iTunes Connect.

4. Hosting content on Parse has no limit on the number of files/total size of files.

5. Cross app-store in-app purchase hosting. At Parse we see a lot of developers making the same app for Android and iOS. By hosting the content on Parse, you can use Parse for both your iOS and Android app. Parse would know how to validate the purchase receipt against iTunes Connect, Google Play, Amazon AppStore, and other App Stores. Currently Parse does not offer Android support, but we would be able to do this if there is sufficient demand.

Just some of my thoughts...Hope it helps.

Hi Mattt, in PFQueryTableViewController, the downloading does not start until the scrolling stops. We chose to do this because we wanted the default loading behavior to be very passive. You could verify this is indeed the behavior from the animated gif - the network activity does not start until the table finished scrolling.

Just glanced through SDWebImage's source code. Think this is quite similar to AFNetworking's UIImageView category. My comment below should also apply here.

In the Parse framework, the equivalent class is PFImageView. We chose to design our API differently; from my experience, I believe the assignment of the web image to load and the actual download of the images should be two different steps. This is evident in UITableViewController. In tableView:objectForRowAtIndexPath:, the app developer should know which URL to load, but we should not load the images at this point. Although you CAN achieve the same goal via the other two libraries' API, I feel strongly the API becomes more intuitive to use when the two steps are broken apart.

Exactly. To be aggressive in loading is kind of risky since doing it poorly can lead to a non-responsive behavior in the app. App developers can always choose to be more aggressive if the default behavior is not aggressive enough, but if the framework chooses to be overly aggressive, it prohibits some apps from adopting the framework.

Sunsu, thanks for the awesome feedback. We do think this is a great addition. After all, PFQueryTableViewController is about loading data stored on Parse; and if a developer has images stored on Parse, we should be able to load them and display them in the controller. Let me know what other things would be great to have!

Currently, it loads the onscreen images when the scrolling stops (which is a non-aggressive loading behavior). If you wish to be more aggressive about loading the images, i.e. loads the images when the scrolling starts to decelerate, or loads the images as soon as the table scrolls (very aggressive), you can fine control the loading behavior via the loadInBackground method in PFImageView (the PFTableViewCell has a PFImageView as its imageView property).

In designing the API, I debated whether I should introduce a property that lets developer specify a loading behavior from a default set. I chose not to expose it for now and wait for some feedback; if this is a commonly asked feature, I can always introduce it later. I find, in the personal apps I build, this loading behavior is sufficient for 90% of them. Would love to hear others' feedback, though.

I have not seen SDWebImage. From what I can recall about AFNetworking (a fantastic library, by the way), it provides a category on UIImageView whose methods can download and display web images. I don't think it provides any help for loading images in a UITableViewController context. In other words, the app developer still needs to state what URL to load and when to load the images. With PFQueryTableViewController, you just state which image each cell should load, and the loading is managed by the controller.

yep, database indices are created for you automatically. This is one of the details we hope app developer should never worry about.

In particular, I'd like to find out from you what kind of manipulation you have been needing to do. This would help us define the scope of this feature.

Cool. I work there and I have been thinking about server side scripting for a while now. Would love to talk to you more about it; shoot me at my first name at Parse.com

-Andrew

What feature can Parse build for you so that you don't need to hook up with Heroku just to manipulate data? Perhaps a way for you to author data manipulation macros in the data browser and the ability to run these macros based on events?