The Jewelry Television iPhone and Android apps are now available in their respective app marketplaces. Feel free to go download them and have a look while you read through my brief overview.

Take a look at the home screen below. It features some banner space, a live refreshing current item on air, links to recent items shown on TV, and a featured item category.

JTV App Home Screen

We also included the ability to watch JTV live through the app, as long as you are connected to 3G or wi-fi. This section features the current item which refreshes below the video, so you can tap the item and buy it if you so desire.

The live broadcast streaming within the app.

Let me say that writing an app for a home shopping network provides unique challenges that most app developers don’t have to contend with, namely, streaming video of your live broadcast. Getting this right and working has been a fairly complex challenge filled with consideration for all sorts of devices, connection speed, and bit rate scenarios to make sure that its available to as many devices as possible and looks good at the same time.

We also included some non-live video in our video library section. Here we have pre-defined categories of video that we can update on the fly for app users.

The video library section of the JTV app.

Education is a big part of what Jewelry Television stands for, and the Gemopedia section features information about gemstones, including pictures and video, and is a convenient little gemstone guide you can keep in your pocket.

The Gemopedia, a mobile gemstone guide.

We also provide some tools in the app, such as a ring sizer, program guide, and channel finder that uses your GPS to tell you what channel Jewelry Television is on in your immediate area.

The JTV Channel Finder

The JTV Ring Sizer

Of course the app wouldn’t be complete without the ability to shop. We have a full shopping experience built in to the app, where you can browse the roughly 30,000 jewelry and gemstone items on JTV.com and purchase, right from your mobile device.

Shopping inside the JTV app.

All in all the app is a solid version 1.0. Keep an eye out for more features rolling out soon.

Download the apps: JTV iPhone App

QR Code for the Android App

QR Code for Android App

Since Titanium allows you to write code in Javascript, you can write functions to do a bunch of stuff for you and make writing your app much easier. I wrote a simple timer function that can be used to fire other events within your app. This might be useful for games, cooking apps, etc.

So here’s the code:

function setTimer(timetowait,context) {
 
mt=0;
mtimer = setInterval(function() {
 
    	mt++;
	Ti.API.info(mt);
 
    if(mt==timetowait) {
        // do something;
	clearInterval(mtimer);
 	Ti.App.fireEvent(context);
        }
 
},1000);
};

So let’s break it down to understand what it does. First let’s look at the variable we pass into the function: timetowait and context

timetowait simply represents the number of seconds the timer should count to until you want your event to fire.

context is the name of the event that you want to fire when the timer reaches timetowait

Ti.API.info(mt) simply writes out the Titanium debug window the value of mt, which is our variable that increments every second. This is optional, but helpful in the development process to see exactly when the timer stops.

clearInterval(mtimer) tells the setInterval function in Titanium to essentially stop/reset.

Ti.App.fireEvent(context) fires the name of the event we passed in as the variable context.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of how this could be used. Let’s say we have a basic game where the player has to do something in a specific amount of time. We could use our setTimer function to time the game, and then show a game over alert message in the app:

//set the timer for 30 seconds, and after that show the game over message
setTimer(30, 'showGameOver');
 
//create an event listener for our Game Over alert
Ti.App.addEventListener("showGameOver", function() {
	alert("Game Over!");
});

That’s a pretty simple example. Let’s say we wanted to continuously loop the timer:

//set the timer for 30 seconds, and then call the timer function again
setTimer(30, 'loopTimer');
 
Ti.App.addEventListener("loopTimer", function() {
 
	//call the timer function again
	setTimer(30, 'loopTimer');
});

In both of these cases we can add as much complexity to our event listeners (the event that is fired when the timer ends) as we want…we could update the on-screen display, fire off multiple events, write data to the local database, load a remote file, check network connectivity, etc.

Timers can be used for all sorts of things in iPhone apps. Hope this helps someone get started using them.

I decided that because of the potentially massive amount of data in my dropshipper’s XML feed file, that I should save the file to my server before attempting to process any data. I set up a cron job to use CURL to fetch the file. First I created a file called ‘importproducts.php’ and added the following code:

importproducts.php

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//my dropshipper's feed URL - replace with your dropshipper's feed
$myFeed = 'http://www.mydropshipperssite.com/feedurl.xml';
 
// specify the name of the file you want to save
$myFilename = 'product_feed.xml';
 
 
	if ($myFeed != '') {
	//  Initialize the cURL session
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $myFeed);
	//Create a new file
	$fp = fopen($myFilename, 'w');
	// Save to file
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
	// Execute the cURL session
	curl_exec ($ch);
	//Close cURL session and file
	curl_close ($ch);
	fclose($fp);
 
	echo "Feed Imported Successfully!";
 
 
		//check the file size - if its 0 then my dropshipper didn't provide any updates, so don't let me know
		if (filesize($myFilename) > 0) {
 
			// send email to me when executed
			$to = "youremail@yourdomain.com";
			$subject = "Feed Imported";
			$body = "Hi,\n\nThe latest product data for YOURSITE has been downloaded on ";
			$body .= date('l jS \of F Y h:i:s A')."\n\n File Size: ".filesize($myFilename) . " bytes";
 
				if (mail($to, $subject, $body)) {
				  echo("<p>Message successfully sent!</p>");
					 } else {
				 echo("<p>Message delivery failed...</p>");
				}
 
		}
 
 
	}

Now that we have this script written, we need to process the data. Before that, let me show you an example of the xml data I am working with in the xml file we just saved with the import script. Here is sample xml:

product_feed.xml

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<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<products>
<product sku="15569" mfg_part_number="405970-1" upc="082324027055">
<inventory quantity="13"/>
<price your_price="143.18" list="159.99"/>
<description short="A product description"/>
</product>
 
<product sku="16128" mfg_part_number="406350-1" upc="082324029301">
<inventory quantity="0"/>
<price your_price="128.18" list="149.99"/>
<description short="Another product description"/>
</product>
</products>

Now we can talk about the next file, the one that takes the XML data and uses it to update products in Magento via the API. We’ll name this file ‘processupdates.php’.

processupdates.php

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//include the Magento API file - replace with your server path to the file
require_once('/some/path/to/public_html/app/Mage.php');
 
// ***** Configuration ******
$myDomain = 'http://www.yourdomain.com';
$myAPILogin = 'username';
$myAPIKey = 'password';
 
//calculate the price markup - useful if you have a standard markup you apply
$myMarkUp = .30;
$defaultMarkup = .30;
 
// get my saved file name
$myFilename = 'product_feed.xml';
 
//load up local xml file for processing
$feed_xml = simplexml_load_file($myFilename);
 
// Begin SOAP Requests
$client = new SoapClient($myDomain.'/api/?wsdl');
$session = $client->login($myAPILogin, $myAPIKey);
 
$updatedProducts = "";
 
//some counters - counting loops this way lets me see and set where the count increments
$x = 0;
 
//some filter date to pass to the API - add more to filter your results further - see Magento API docs
$filterData = array('type'=>'simple');
 
//get all my database products into an array
$products = $client->call($session, 'catalog_product.list', array($filterData));
 
 
//loop through my product array
foreach ($products as $product) {
 
echo "Starting product loop...<br/><br/>";
 
 
//get my database product sku - for cleaner reference in the code
$mysku = $product['sku']
 
//search directly in the product sku attribute in the xml for my sku
$res = $feed_xml->xpath("//product[@sku='$mysku']");
 
 
// if we find one, lets process it
if(!empty($res)) {
 
	//matched - make updates
	echo "Matched: ".$mysku;
 
	//price updates
	if ($res[0]->price['list'] != '') {
		$newprice = $res[0]->price['your_price'] + (($res[0]->price['list'] - $res[0]->price['your_price'])*$myMarkUp);
	} else {
		$newprice = $res[0]->price['your_price'] + ($res[0]->price['your_price']*$defaultMarkup);
	}
 
	//build my array to pass to the magento API
	$fieldPriceData = array('cost'=>$res[0]->price['your_price']*1, 'price'=>$newprice, 'upc'=>$res[0]->product['upc']);
	//update magento with price data
	$client->call($session, 'catalog_product.update', array($product['sku'], $fieldPriceData));
 
	//qty and stock updates
	if (($res[0]->inventory['quantity']*1) != 0) {
		$fieldQtyData = array('qty'=>$res[0]->inventory['quantity']*1, 'is_in_stock'=>1);
		echo "In Stock<br/>";
	} else {
		$fieldQtyData = array('qty'=>$res[0]->inventory['quantity']*1, 'is_in_stock'=>0);
		echo "Out of Stock<br/>";
	}
 
	//update magento with quantity and stock data
	$client->call($session, 'product_stock.update', array($product['sku'], $fieldQtyData));
 
	//record the updated product for emailing later
	$updatedProducts .= "SKU: ".$mysku." - ".$res[0]->description['short']."\nPrice: ".$newprice."\nCost: ".$res[0]->price['your_price']."\nQty: ".$res[0]->inventory['quantity']."\n\n";
 
	//increment my counter
	$x = $x + 1; 
 
} else {
 
echo "no match<br/><br/>";
 
}
 
 
 
// send mail to me
$to = "you@yourdomain.com";
$subject = "Feed Processed";
$body = "Hi,\n\nThe latest data for ".$myDomain." has been processed on ".date('l jS \of F Y h:i:s A')."\n\n";
$body .= "Products Updated: ".$x."\n\n".$updatedProducts;
if (mail($to, $subject, $body)) {
  echo("<p>Message successfully sent!</p>");
	 } else {
 echo("<p>Message delivery failed...</p>");
}

Now all you need to do is set up the cron jobs to call your import file at one interval, and your process file at another interval. Note that this works for me because I have a limited number of database products. If you have thousands of products you might want to have your site updating products by category, for example. If anyone has any better ideas on how to do any of this, please let me know. I always like to learn new stuff!

Download Files: Magento API XML Import - 15.82 KB - 651 Downloads