Releasing your app into the wild doesn’t mean you have to say goodbye. Adding mobile analytics can provide a method for your furry binary creation to communicate back to you, relaying in fascinating detail all of its adventures in the wilderness.
In the previous blog we covered an introduction to S3 storage, created an S3 bucket and did a simple download using NSURLSession. The issue with that is that the image file had to have public access. This means that anyone with the URL would be able to download the contents of the bucket. In reality it’s not a great idea to have such open access. In order to have control over what users can do to your S3 buckets it’s necessary to grasp a few other exciting AWS services. These being; Cognito and IAM. As well as this we’ll cover using CocoaPods to install the AWS SDK. If you’re thinking: that sounds like a hot tamale! Don’t worry, we’ll break it into smaller, bit size tamales.
Beside the power, scalability and low cost of cloud computing, one of the most exciting aspects of Amazon Web Services is how easy is it to experiment with. At first the AWS console can look like daunting array of icons and services (SimpleElasticBeanFace…coming soon?) However, it’s much easier to play around with and learn than back in the days of running your own hardware servers. Plus there’s already a massive global infrastructure of data centers at your disposal! Simple Storage Solution, S3, is a prefect starting point to get your feet wet (or should I say: head wet in the cloud). This blog will cover how to upload an image via the AWS console and download it using Swift in iOS. Even before delving into the AWS Swift SDK, downloading images/video/JSON from S3 into an app is quite straightforward.
JSON is a standard of data interchange that can be very handy for getting information into and out of an app. By Parsing in JSON from the outside world an app can dynamically display new information such as the latest weather, sports scores or travel information. There are many exciting API JSON feeds out there that make it possible to build an app capable of accessing information in real time over a network connect.