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over 13 years ago

Tips on developing with Viggle

Hey developers! The submission deadline for the Viggle AppJam is August 22, 2013. 

Ready to define the TV-watching experience? Here are some additional resources to help you develop with Viggle. If you haven't started working on your app yet, check out our Quick-start Guide and get cracking!

Pointers from Viggle's tech team

  1. Aside from the action inside of the VAPP javascript bridge, your VAPP can be a normal HTML5 application. This means that it's easy to create something that works great as a standalone app, but also offers an enhanced experience for Viggle users.

  2. Using Weinre (pronounced winery) is a great way to debug your VAPP while it's running in Viggle. Weinre is a remote debugger for JavaScript that works cross-platform and doesn't require your app to be on the same network as your development box.

  3. We've posted a dump of all the returned messages from our VAPP methods in Viggle's developer Google group. Check out the dump to learn which data you can get back from each method, and design your app accordingly.

  4. Remember: every VAPP method takes a callback as it's first argument. If you want to get any data back from the method, you'll get it as the first parameter passed into the callback.

  5. Don't forget to save room for ads! We're opening up Viggle's ad serving technology to our developer community, and if you serve our ads, we'll pay you. So see if you can work our ad units into your page design. For more information, look through our detailed tutorial on the topic. 

  6. Unless you have have a plan for managing caching of your VAPPs serverside or with a different META directive, we recommend you use the <META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE"> directive in the head of the HTML that will be loaded into the Viggle chrome. This makes it much easier to update throughout the development phase and will ensure that your users have the latest version of your code. For more info on cache control through meta tags, check out this page. 

  7. If you've already started developing and haven't taken care of step 6, you might have a cached page that can't be updated. If this is the case, "hard restart" the Viggle app and try again. If this doesn't solve the problem, you may need to re-install Viggle. To learn more on how to hard restart an app, check out these tips for iOS and Android. 

Still have questions? 

For technical questions about the Viggle Platform or Viggle API, post in the Viggle Google Group.  For questions about the Viggle AppJam, post on the Discussion Forum or shoot the ChallengePost team an email at [email protected].