Hi gang, We've begun to roll-out the Live / Design mode feature we've been talking about. Most of you will see a Publish Changes in your app control panels. We'll provide a .pdf in the coming days to help explain some details about this feature. Most of you will understand from these simple ideas... THIS FEATURE IS NOT RELATED TO OLDER v.13, 1.4, v1.5 Apps made with buzztouch. 1) Nothing has changed if you don't want it to. 2) Newly downloaded source code will have a few additional properties in the BT_config.txt file. You can see these by looking at the "Show Config Data" screen. Note the "currentMode" and a few other elements. You can ignore the "registerForPushURL" and "promptForPushNotifications" for now but you're welcome to get excited about them :-) 3) If you re-download your code for an app, you'll want to design / adjust while in Design Mode. When you're ready to publish to the App Store or market, update the JSON in your project to "Live Mode." From there on out you can test your changes on your device by running it in "Design" mode again. "App Store apps should be compiled with "currentMode":"Live" so they don't notice changes until you click the publish button." 4) You can update the version numbers to whatever you want now. Change it as necessary. This could be helpful in a few cases where you want to easily differentiate between several different apps in your control panel that have the same name. Which leads to the next cool change..you can name your apps whatever you want now. Previously you had to choose a name that was unique across the entire buzztouch system. This is no longer the case and should make it much easier to manage things. BEWARE. If you use the same project name, and the same app name, it could get confusing when you download your source code. Pay special attention to this change so you know what you're downloading.

Wow, cool David. Thanks!! Any idea when this functionality will be ported to the selfhosted version? Thanks again! Best Regards, Danny

Push Notification roll out is next after Live / Design gotchas worked out (always something!). Both are in the new Self Hosted package. A week or so seems likely? Lots going on....

Sounds cool, thanks David, sounds like an excellent feature - I get the gist of it, looking forward to the pdf too before I take the plunge. Also, I echo @PSMDanny's comment. I can see the feature in my BT hosted account, but my apps are self-hosted. My scenario for first use is I have an app that I published for ios, then I realised when I started on an android build of it that I had used features that I have to change to make a single BT app that is android compatible (capitals in my build, RSS plugin). So I expect to be trying this out very soon! Alan

Looking forward to it David.

Can't wait to try it out. Thanks David!

Sounds great...can't wait for the new version of self hosted will all the new new features( specially push notifications) to roll out...just waiting for the bank people to solve my credit card issue and upgrade and get the cool member's tag.. Thanks David and the team, buzztouch really changed my life...

Sounds great David! Quick question- Are you saying this feature isn't available for v1.5 apps?

Awesome David! This helps tremendously in testing and displaying the correct changes once it hits respective app stores! Thanks again

This is very cool, I cant wait to pick your brain some day on the engineering behind this. I am guessing it looks for a JSON property in order to fire the refresh method, but I know it has to be more complicated then that. (multiple variables) I love the nerd factor of this stuff. Dynamic content, multiple platforms, amazing amount of options, works on older devices. Still blows me away what you have done here. Great work as always. Jim

Great feature. The naming change an added bonus. Thanks.

BAZINGA!! -Sheldon

Thanks David @Buztouch! I like the feature where you can name the different Apps in the control panel now. That is huge! LA

Thank you David! I think this will allow also better beta testing for you pre-release apps :-)

Awesome! In Danny's shoes here. We self-hosted folk will have to just wait a little more for our new goodies, we can do it ;) I'm going to have a fun time picking at the source-code to make sure our mods and theme still works for the new huge server update, super excited! Cheers! David https://buzztouchmods.com

Very excited to see "promptForPushNotifications"!! Good to know it is getting there. The Live / Design function is a great addition to the system. Like many, I had to hide the new pages in development with a login which wasn't very cool. But this is something else! Farcat

Will Push Notifications be allowed via API or JSON? I have some apps that aren't connected to a control-panel but still are "online" that would really benefit from PN's!

@chris1: APN is a combination of four critical ideas. 1) The device needs to register "somewhere" A backend is necessary to keep track of what devices have registered to receive your messages. This is NOT the Apple Push Notification service, this is a backend you maintain. In member cases it will almost always be the buzztouch backend or a self hosted control panel backend. 2) The code in the app needs to know where to send the registration token. This the empty registerForPushURL property you see in the JSON. This will have URL to send the token too. This could be anything but the script at the URL must know what to do with the token. In most cases this will "point" to our backend or the self hosted control panel backend. 3) 2) When a device is registered to receive messages, the code in the app needs to understand what to do when a message arrives. 4) Apple Sends the messages: Your backend, ours, somebodies, sends a message to the Apple Push Notification service to send the actual message. Same idea with Google and Android. This is why you need a backend...to save the device tokens to send to apple with each message to send. I'm not exactly sure what you mean but pushing via APi or JSON but can makes some assumptions. If you're apps isn't "connected" to a control panel, you'll still need a way to register devices and send messages. You could easily set up an app in your BT panel just for this purpose. Register devices to that app then send pushes from that panel. All other parts of the app could be disconnected from any backend. Bottom line, it'll work a few different ways depending on the developer's approach and goal. Including with offline apps.

could any of these things inflict a problem with current apps. ? somehow when i update my screens the app itself wont update anymore. i made some changes in my web screens but in the emu and on ipad/iphone it doesnt show.

@themc: Nope..should affect any existing apps. The Live / Design feature only affects the "modified date" that the app uses to determine if you've made any content updates. "when i update my screens the app itself wont update anymore" Hard to know what this means without a few more details. If you're modifying web content you created in the control panel, you could test by making sure the Refresh button is displayed (advanced properties in these screen types). Use the refresh button in the app, see if your changes appear.

thnx will try

ok i tried it with force refresh on and the browser refresh button. the button does appears. but the content of the custom webpage still wont update. even when i try to refresh it manually

Hmm...seems strange. Connect your device to Xcode, or use the simulator...does the Output Console show any clues? It could be that the content is having trouble downloading / saving to the device. The Output Console shows all sorts of neato info to help you debug this type of thing. Use the clear button on the console, empty the results. Click Refresh...are there any clues in here? We've written lots of code to the output console to help "see" whats going on.

here is the run info for the app: ## EDIT REMOVED CONSOLE OUTPUT

and here is the code from a refresh in the custom html part. ## EDIT REMOVED CONOLE OUTPUT

Please don't post the entire contents of your Output Console on this forum. I removed what you posted. Why? Have a look at this data...there are all sorts of pieces of info in this output that you do NOT want the public to see. YOur app id's, URLs, etc. I reviewed this and see nothing wrong with it. It clearly shows what URL's the "web content" is coming from. Load those in your browser (copy them)..does the content you expect to see show? I loaded on up, saw some images, content, etc. but there isn't anyway for me to know what you're changing. You'll end up having to figure out what is and what isn't showing in the device. This is a relatively simple process, the app should show the same thing your regular browser shows when you load one of the URL's you see in the output console. If it does not, you'll need to step-by-step see where it's not doing what you expect. I dont' see anything wrong with this output.

ok sorry my bad. i used the link it should load and i get the content it should be in my web browser however i dont get that content when i look at it from the app screen

short said it show how it should be in safari but not in the app

im gonna try to remove this page and renew it by a new html screen and see if it solves update: removed the screen and created a new one problem is solved now

Weird! Glad you go it solved. Not sure what could have been happening :-)

dunno either all i know is it did not update since yesterday around 16.00 european time. i had multiple screens like this and renewd them all

I might have a clue. I have had experience of the same thing. Over the weekend, I was editing a text/html page that I was testing on both Android and Apple devices at the same time. When I refreshed, the iPhone refused to show the updates I was making, the Android phone showed them immediately. I stopped, had a break. A few hours later it seems the problem had righted itself and the updates came through on the iPhone.

the weird thing is that even now when i recreat a webpage i can see it again. at first it looks good but when i want to re-edit it now it keeps the content i entered first.

off topic @themc: you've sent me a pm but you haven't turned on private messaging so I can't reply (I can but you don't receive anything). Look in your account --> public profile Best Regards, Danny

the weird thing is that even now when i recreat a webpage i can see it again. at first it looks good but when i want to re-edit it now it keeps the content i entered first.

Thanks @David - that clears some things up. The scenario I was thinking of is a BT app that has its config.txt stored on a webserver (but not a self-hosted control panel). Thus the app is online, just not connected. For an app like that, I'm guessing I can still send PN's from Buzztouch? It sounds like another piece of the puzzle is handling when to process the scripts. Since I haven't seen what you're planning in action yet, I don't know if we can schedule PN's for a later date. That's how Parse works (though I haven't had time to implement it yet). But doing so would require something more advanced than simple php with a CRON job I'm guessing. Which I guess maybe that brings me to the confusing part of my question. By JSON or API, I was wondering if it would be possible to send a PN request from my website to BT to then send to fthe device? I think I have a lot more to learn about PN's - looks like I'll be doing some more reading!

Excited for the webinar tomorrow to hear how these new features are going to work. I'm expecting an SRO crowd and to do a lot of listening! don't forget to register: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8410080125806915072

I'm not sure if anybody is still monitoring this thread. If there are, can you tell me where I can get the PDF mentioned in the first post about how to use Live/Design mode? Thanks, Dave

I'm not sure if anybody is still monitoring this thread. If there are, can you tell me where I can get the PDF mentioned in the first post about how to use Live/Design mode? Thanks, Dave

Has anything changed with LIve/Design mode lately? See this thread below; several reports of "Live" apps, that are getting updates without Publishing. http://www.buzztouch.com/forum/thread.php?tid=352C226D7194F4B612A7302&fid=A00805FCC9962ECBA15A891&sortColumn=FT.id&sortUpDown=&currentPage=2

There are a few more recent posts that suggest it is broken with BT 3.0. A fix was published, by (I think) @chris1, which I have not personally tried.

I've implemented Cris1's fix and it does not work. Also I just published a new app 3.0 self hosted with push. The push notification works but new devices are registering as live and design. Not the same device though. It's totally random. Dave