Module 12: Creating an Uber Clone
Transcript
when i started on this road i didn’t want to create a driver app and wanted to focus only on the client app unfortunately a driver app is unavoidable as the main app is useless without it unlike the main uber app i don’t want to clone the driver app as this would throw the whole course out of focus i decided to hack the existing app to implement driver specific features there and as a result we use a whole lot of code this means the driver app can reuse sign up map networking code etc this is important as code reuse breeds stability and maturity unfortunately it also means the app isn’t as well made as the main app since it was designed for end users with driver mode tacked on top Use Cases we often build one app and sell it to multiple customers after all most customers ask for similar things with minor changes for example if i build a restaurant app and then sell it to one establishment i can then resell it to another one with almost no change at all another common use case is the demo or free version of a paid app you want to use as much of the work as possible without maintaining two code bases another case which is relevant what i’m building today is two target audiences of roughly the same functionality for instance in this case the driver app has many common elements with the passenger app so why not build the same app with minor modifications the first thing we need to understand is how the app store identifies your application pretty much all apps use a unique identifier a string that is similar to package names which we map to which we map the main application package name so the trick is to add a new package for the new app Creating a New Package the basic hello driver would be something like this notice i chose to override the methods but i didn’t have to i could have just derived the main class and that would have been enough but i prefer overriding the lifecycle methods for clarity in this case this isn’t enough though the codename one settings properties file contains all of the internal configuration details about project i copied it aside and renamed it to codename one settings user properties i then edited the file to use the driver details and copied that into codename one settings driver properties notice i snipped most of the text here and there are several other locations where the values are mentioned Updating the App it’s important to update the app id to use your apple developer account prefix and package name this is automatically generated when you run the signing wizard to create ios developer certificates these certificates should be the same between the driver and the user app however provisioning profiles should be generated for both when you build an ios version of your app update codename1 dot main name to match the class name update codename 1 package name to match the package name other than certificates there are many nuances you would probably want to customize in this file such as the app name and the icon once this is all done you would have a separate app that does the exact same thing Driver Detection it’s really easy for us to detect the driver app and write custom code for it first let’s change the uber clone class to add driver detection this introduces a public is driver mode method into the uber clone class it would always return false unless we made one tiny change to driver app this is a block within driver app class we can now invoke his driver on the uber clone class and get the right result Push Notification i’ve discussed push notification before in the beginner course please make sure to follow the registration instructions there and update the values in the globals class once those are in place we can integrate push into the driver app we need to register for push every time the app loads the logic is that the push key might change so we need to keep it up to date we send a type 3 push which will invoke this code twice the first time around will receive a hash symbol followed by a numeric id the second time will receive a the display value when we receive the display value we can show a notification to the driver and if he clicks this notification we can show him the details of the ride ideally we would also have a rides menu item in the side menu but for now i’m compromising on the driver app to move forward when register succeeds this method is invoked the main use case is sending the push key to the server so it can trigger push messages notice that the device id is not equal to the push dot get key value device id is the historic native device key and shouldn’t be used also notice i send this every time even if the value didn’t change it’s not a big deal in terms of overhead so i ignored that small bit of overhead