Chomp Connect for iPhoneOS

I want to highlight a specific feature of our Chomp Connect for iPhone OS offering – shared sessions on the client device.

To encourage users to submit a rating it’s essential to reduce the overall complexity of the process. If they have to jump through hoops before they can tell the world about this app they’re using, they may not bother. Our aim is to keep that process quick and easy, helping to make sure a user will have their say.

One of the great features of Chomp Connect is the ability to find and use an existing user session. If a user has taken the time to signup for or sign into an account, we don’t want them to go through that again unless they really have to! That session may have been established using the Chomp app directly, or by Chomp Connect in another app.

To achieve this we need to share data between apps. These apps have no ability to know each other is installed, or even if the Chomp app is installed. If Chomp was installed, you could use a registered URL scheme to launch Chomp, have the user perform the rating and possibly return them to your app (if your App also registered a URL scheme). Although more and more people are downloading Chomp every day, it would still limit the potential for users to review the app on Chomp.

I searched for other methods of sharing small amounts of data between apps, and discovered that iPhone OS 3.0 and above provides great support for pasteboards. There are two system pasteboards, System and Finder, but also an application pasteboard that can be created with a unique name. These application pasteboards can be configured as persistent allowing them to be shared between applications that know that unique name. We configure Chomp Connect to use a specific pasteboard name, enabling any app that embeds Chomp Connect to seamlessly share any previous session on the device.

Sharing information between Apps with UIPasteboard

Implementation is very straightforward, using the UIPasteboard convenience methods that set and get a simple string pasteboard item.

/* ChompDialog.m */

+ (UIPasteboard *)getPasteboard {
    // Chomp Connect pasteboard will be created if none exists
    UIPasteboard *ccPasteboard = [UIPasteboard pasteboardWithName:@"com.chomp.connect.pboard" create:YES];
    if (ccPasteboard.changeCount < 1) [ccPasteboard setPersistent:YES];
    return ccPasteboard;
}

+ (NSString *)getChompUserToken {
    return [[ChompDialog getPasteboard] string];
}

+ (void)setChompUserToken:(NSString *)newToken {
    [[ChompDialog getPasteboard] setString:newToken];
}

The end result is reduced complexity for a user to perform a review, therefore a higher probability that they will.

We make it easy for your users to show their love!

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