I am about to start work on a project that will aid in teaching new vocabulary, in an interruption-driven style, presenting new words, via interrupts, for the user to learn at optimal times.
I am looking for a way to detect which app is running. I found some posts that touched on retrieving the running app list part of my question, “Can we retrieve the applications currently running in iPhone and iPad“. Is this still viable to use in iOS 6?
I cannot find any relevant posts about retrieving data about the type/category of app that is running (media player/game/pdf viewer etc.). Do iOS apps contain any meta data or way of retrieving this type of data?
Naturally, to interrupt the user at an optimal time it would have to take the type of app in use, into consideration.
I am open minded about alternative ways of detecting when interrupts may be optimal and open to criticism of my current plan.
You can get a list of running processes (aka apps), as noted here, but you can’t get any meta data on them from the OS. From a UX perspective, you might consider a solution where the user manually schedules the interruptions, or gives you a schedule window. For instance, maybe every day between 3 and 4, start notifying me. Personally, I delete spammy apps super quickly, so I’d consider doing something other than interruptions.