I want to be able to open the Square Register android app from my own app. I am having some problems figuring out how I can do that though. I thought that the Launch Native App plugin would work, but I cannot figure out how to make it open that specific app. Can anyone help me with this.

Welcome to Buzztouch! You can always launch another app via 'intent'. Intent LaunchIntent = getPackageManager().getLaunchIntentForPackage("com.package.whatever"); startActivity(LaunchIntent); Cheers! -- Smug

Thank you for your response. I am not very experienced with this sort of thing, so could you explain in a bit more detail what I would need to do to launch the app via intent?

Is that Bluffton South Carolina? I have land there. Spent much of my misspent youth on the May River :) Honestly, there is no way 'at *my* skill level' to be able to adaquately teach you Android Intents. I can barely understand it myself, lol! Lars Vogel has a pretty good website that I use to learn new Android concepts… http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/AndroidIntent/article.html Hopefully that can help you out. When you get back to a Buzztouch specific problem, I'm happy to throw in whatever knowledge I have that I think could help. But I don't want to dispense advice on a subject I'm weak at… So off to vogella with you :) Cheers! -- Smug

Yeah it is Bluffton SC. I am a docent at the Heyward House/ Bluffton Welcome Center right down the street from the May. That is actually who I am building an app for right now. I looked at the website and I think I can figure it out. Unfortunately, when I try to test the app on my phone now, it pops up an error that says: Something's not right. There was a problem loading the app's configuration data.

Sorry for the late reply. The error "There was a problem loading the app's configuration data" means the json configuration file has an issue with it. Thats a fair amount of data even with only a few screens. What we'll normally do is either from the BT Control panel, or from your BT_config.txt file, copy the json (select all, copy) and paste the contents into the form at http://jsonlint.com and that can usually help to pinpoint an issue. It usually ends up being an odd character in a Title, or value, or something. Json can be a bit daunting at times; when it's working, it works well. but all it takes is a missing comma or the wrong character and the whole world comes crashing down. But tools like Jsonlint help to keep things straight. Cheers! -- Smug My place is down toward the end of All Joy Road by the river, just off Allendale street. About 3 or 4 blocks from the Beach. My mom bought it in the early 70's, before much of anything was there. That place has *grown*. It makes me laugh when folks refer to it as part of 'Hilton Head', when it's not. It used to be a simple shrimping and fishing town. I used to go hunting and shooting in what now is peoples neighborhoods, lol!

Thanks. That worked out perfectly. Missing a comma. I showed the app to the House Manager yesterday and she loved it. However, now she wants us to also be able to do an interactive self-guided tour of the historic house through the app. I have been considering just doing a menu with each room listed and then do html pages with the information about everything in the room on them, but I would really like to figure out a way to make the app show a different list of objects depending on the direction the tablet is facing. I am assuming that this would be much too difficult, but do you know of any way to use Buzztouch to present the information in a more interesting manner than just viewing all of the information about the entire room in the one page?

If you want to 'really' get sexy, use beacons. You *can* get it to display different things depending on the compass direction, but it's nothing that has been done; it'd have to be coded from scratch. I just know it can be done because I fool around with location services. Otherwise I'd take a look at what others have done to get an idea of which direction you'd like to take this. There's going to be a good idea waiting somewhere, I just don't have one 'now'. Cheers! -- Smug

Thank you for all of your help. Sorry if I am getting annoying with all these questions. I do have another one though. Is there a way to only allow one user to access a screen that requires a login? I need to find a way to keep visitors from being able to see the self guided tour screens until they pay us, but without letting them see some of the other screens. I was thinking of having one login that a member of the staff would have to use to allow visitors to see the self guided tour, but keep them from seeing our Guided Tour scripts.

Well, there is a login screen that you can connect to the control panel. Users need to login before they are able to access the screen. Mr. David also recently released a 'PIN Pad' plugin that might work for you. Give them a look and see if they're what you're looking for… Cheers! -- Smug

Okay, the pin pad plugin is exactly what I need, except in android. So, I thought a bit more and I could make it work if there is a way to open a screen in my app from the device web browser. Is that possible?

From the 'device' web browser? yes… although that would lead them 'out' of your app, wouldn't it? You might want to consider a CustomURL or HTMLDoc plugin if you want to display web content 'within' your app… Cheers! -- Smug

I have an online form to register for a tour and I have an iframe in an html page in the app. So what I am thinking is have the registration form show a link to the page in the app with the tour on it. Would that be possible?

you can do that. But remember, if this is for iOS, the Apple Review team have a long standing reputation as 'app snobs' and will reject an app if they don't think it's cool enough. You can add web content, and such… but make sure a few of the features are exclusively iOS and make the app stand out. Cheers! -- Smug

Okay, I started looking into the beacons and I want to use Gimbal. I have gotten almost everything set up for it according to http://gimbal.com/doc/android_quickstart.html, but I got to the part about Enable Context Core Connector. I was wondering if you could tell me where I would need to put that code, or if it matters for Buzztouch apps.

Sorry for the late reply. Sometimes I don't notice things in a timely fashion… Usually it depends on the code as to 'where' it is placed within the BT framework… I haven't read through 'all' of the documentation, because I'm not working with Gimbals or beacons just yet… soon, but not at the moment. In any event, the 'demo' tutorial is taking you through an 'Android Application'. when integrating this within BT, you would probably not use 'MainActivity', but a plugin, which will end up being a fragment. What I would suggest you do, is create a project using the 'blank' plugin, and work with that. This way you don't mess up any existing code. And as such, you would use 'blank_plugin.java' (or whatever the actual name is) to play with your code. Think of the blank plugin as your 'main activity' and use the plugin 'onCreate' etcetera… Because BTv3 for android is 'fragment' based, rather than 'activity' based, you might run into an error or two due to slightly different syntax between the two. Remember: Google is your friend. and if you get too stuck, give us a yell, but remember I haven't worked on this particular technology, so I might not be able to give 'specific' recommendations. But we'll do our best. Cheers! -- Smug