Bitcoin Forum

Hive (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=304060.0;all) is pleased to announce our v1 app API (https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/wiki/API), now available to developers!

Hive apps are made with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They're basically just websites with JavaScript code, running in an embedded browser inside the Hive window. You can use most features you'd expect from a standard modern web browser.

Full instructions for how to create a Hive application can be found on our wiki here:
https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/wiki/How-to-build-a-Hive-app

API-specific documentation can be found here:
https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/wiki/API

https://i.imgur.com/RhlBKvK.png https://i.imgur.com/6Ac0r4i.png

Frequently asked questions

Q: Once I've built my app, how do I get it included in Hive?
A: A formal submission process will be created over the next few weeks. For the moment, please notify us here and/or via email at w@hivewallet.com and we will review it and hopefully include the app with our test releases.

Q: Do I need to include all of my site or service's functionality in the app?
A: It isn't necessary. Remember, many Hive users will not have used Bitcoin before. Especially for the first version of your app, we suggest that you only include functionality that will give users a taste of your services.

Q: Can I just use an iframe to embed my webpage?
A: There are of course exceptions, but on the whole we would greatly prefer it if you did not. :)

reserved

Great! Best of luck! This will be an amazing contribution to Bitcoin

Great job mate!

Thank you very much, we sure hope so!


Thank you! And thanks for being such an inspiration!

Looking forward to getting BitcoinStarter Bitcoin crowdfunding app on Hive   ;)

Just amazing work guys!

Looks great so far, keep up the good work!

Not only will Hive bridge that gap between the masses and Bitcoin, these integrations will help propel Bitcoin services.  +1 to you guys  :)

You are awesome

so the index.html has to be compiled into the hive.app? Can it be loaded from an url?

yes they have to be compiled and made into a .hiveapp and put in this folder https://github.com/grabhive/hive-osx/tree/master/Hive/Applications then compiled. That is the only way I see currently.


Also if you want someone that has a current git master branch of hive working to test your applications, I be willing to do that for $10 in BTC for each test per application. I even have the debug enabled.

I am working hard and hope i'll have an app for http://satoshirat.com (http://satoshirat.com) soon.

Great job, i think this kind of wallet approach will stimulate btc economy more.

Yes, the base HTML file must be available offline inside the app bundle. When it opens you can use JS to load additional scripts and resources, some of which might be loaded from a remote server (though it's recommended that as much as possible is kept inside the bundle for faster loading).

Actually, the .hiveapp bundles don't have to be added to that Applications folder - those four that are there now will be preinstalled for all users, but the idea is that you can add any apps to Hive that you've downloaded from anywhere - author's website, GitHub, email attachment, whatever. You just open the .hiveapp in Finder and Hive will ask you if you want to "install" the app.

We're planning to release a new build with the new API soon (tomorrow/Wendesday), we just need to make sure the four bundled apps are all working correctly.

Nice! Let us know when you finish it, or if you have any problems with the API.

https://i.imgur.com/z5lUh2L.png

Introducing the LocalBitcoins (http://localbitcoins.com/) app for Hive.

Please note: as with Hive itself, this should be handled with great care and at the moment we do not recommend it for any kind of day-to-day use.

The latest releases will be made available here:
https://github.com/hivewallet/hiveapp-localbitcoins/releases

Issues can be tracked here:
https://github.com/hivewallet/hiveapp-localbitcoins/issues

I'm missing some step zero on how to use your bitcoin global object.

I'm running Hive Version 0.9 (2013102201), and there is no such global object named "bitcoin" that is accessible through the app. Does this build include it or what else am I supposed to do ? The relevant javascript might be as simple as console.log(bitcoin), and Web Inspector will give me a reference error.

Hmm, this doesn't make sense... This build definitely should include the window.bitcoin object in the JS context of an app. Open any of the built-in apps, e.g. supporthive, do a right-click and "Inspect" and check the console, you should see the bitcoin object there:

https://i.imgur.com/V9aTzoQ.png

Ok, at least now I know for sure the object should be there so I rechecked the issue.

There seems to be some problem regarding overwriting a running application, which causes the bitcoin object to disappear. I can reproduce this every time by doing the following:

1) Create your app X and run it inside Hive;
2) While it is running, overwrite it (i.e. open myappx.hiveapp and confirm the overwrite);
3) Right click and click on Reload;
4) Right click and click on Inspect;
5) The bitcoin object is gone

How to fix the missing bitcoin object: restart the app.

does hive save cookies?

Would it work if I just make a blank index.html redirect to ice-dice.com on load?

I actually had to check - looks like the cookies are saved, but only for the duration of one session with Hive, when you quite Hive and restart it, they're lost. There's also localStorage, but it's also lost when you quit Hive, and it also seems to be shared between the apps. We'll have to tweak the WebKit settings - I've added a ticket here: https://github.com/grabhive/hive-osx/issues/101

There's nothing in Hive that would stop you from setting a meta redirect there, but we'd prefer you didn't, because it's not designed to work this way. It will be a worse user experience because things will load slower, and the layout might not be adapted that well to the Hive window. You'd also have to be careful when you use the window.bitcoin object on your website so that you don't break it in other browsers.

Does your embedded browser has "Same Origin Policy"?

I made my site to give json info to feed the app but i am afraid it will not work and have to implement jsonp.

I'll test myself tomorrow, but now i have some problems with my mac ox image and will download a new OSX 10.8.2.


Keep up the good work!

It works. No need for jsonp.

Sorry for the late reply and glad you figured it out!

Note to all app developers:

We have changed our GitHub URL! It is now:
https://github.com/hivewallet

If you happen to spot any places around this forum (or elsewhere) where that needs to be changed, please let us know!

I'm releasing the version 0.1.0 of a game I'm calling Patten. Right now it is available exclusively for the Hive wallet, just grab the .zip at https://github.com/knowitnothing/patten_hive/releases, rename it to .hiveapp then open it. The source is at https://github.com/knowitnothing/patten_hive.

EDIT: Grab the 0.1.2 release at https://github.com/knowitnothing/patten_hive/releases/tag/v0.1.2

https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/e374b0839db85fdc5c1b89feeb004f953f456ea4/687474703a2f2f692e706963726573697a652e636f6d2f696d616765732f323031332f31302f33312f7065552e706e67

http://i.picresize.com/images/2013/10/31/ONjqS.png

Jackpot of 1 bitcoin, max bet of 5 bitcents, more info can be found through the Help button.

Sweet, thanks. We'll test this out for a bit and then maybe bundle it if it all looks good?

I've released my app for satoshirat, it's in your repo, and i've done today a major update.

check it out.

Absolutely, it would be excellent if you could report any problems you find. I expect deposits/withdrawals are working correctly, but if you or anyone else has any issues with that I will refund the deposit + some small amount for hitting a bug.

How do you handle app updates ? Does the user need to download the newer version manually, is it re-packaged in the next hive release, or is there some other way ? If there's some other way, I've missed it.

EDIT: added sentence about refund + bonus in case of bugs.

We will soon have an app repo to which you will be able to send us pull requests. We'll pull them, and the users will be able to download the updates automatically. For the time being we will bundle your updates up with our app, which is auto-updated every Monday.

See here:
https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/issues/56

By the way, you did a really nice job with this. It's extremely responsive.

Alright, 1 week for updates looks good enough at least for now.

Thanks about the app, I tried to make it responsive enough (but the table for Recent history needs some work regarding that). Congrats on the Hive app, I will see if I can contribute to its code too. Keep up the good work.

Should we try to bundle on Monday?

Ok, make sure you grab the latest version present there. I will be releasing an update today.

Nice work. I think I will test it soon (if I find some time   :( )

Please do so with the version 0.2.2 available at https://github.com/knowitnothing/patten_hive/releases, couple of updates today.

interesting

FYI, if you need to detect that the app is opened inside Hive (as opposed to a normal web browser), I've added a custom user agent string - inside Hive, navigator.userAgent will now include "Hive/0.9" (or whatever the version is) at the end. I'd say there should be very few cases where the user agent will have to be checked in code, but it's there if you need it. (This is only available in testing releases now, see GitHub releases page.)

I've also fixed the problem reported by @knowitnothing:

Thanks for the work on Hive.

I believe this custom useragent is only useful if you start accepting apps that only redirect to a site, are you planning to do that ? Or are you planning to include a mini-browser app inside hive ?

We discourage it of course, but there may be some exceptions. And re: mini-browser app, there is no such plan, no.

Oh wow, we totally missed this, sorry yellowdog!
https://github.com/hivewallet/hiveapp-satoshirat

Can you please post a screenshot here so that it stands out more?

Thanks!

Some pics, thx!

http://imageshack.com/a/img607/6279/0r2e.png

http://imageshack.com/a/img17/1861/e77h.png

Adding idea of passing the system language to app platform:
https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/issues/111

The comment linked in that issue seems to suggest more than just passing the current language.

The apps can already be localized, it is a matter of having a menu inside the app where the user can pick some other language, and obviously the app needs to provide such translations. Passing the current language is unneeded, as it is already available through navigator.language in javascript. If navigator.language doesn't reflect the current language, then that should be an issue by itself.

It looks like that comment is after some method for sharing the translations already available for Hive, so the apps can reuse them as much as possible. No amount of translations will ever be enough for all the possible apps, but some of the common translated strings could be reused and at least reduce some trivial effort on the translations there. I'm not sure if this actually helps, as it might induce to apps half-translated which doesn't improve the user experience.

Yes.

No, it wasn't about passing any actual translated strings from Hive to apps, that wouldn't make much sense as you say. This is specifically about passing info about the locale currently used in the app. I haven't thought about navigator.language, that can probably be useful for now, but I'm guessing it doesn't always reflect the Hive locale exactly - especially if Hive doesn't currently have a translation for the language you've chosen in the system preferences.

Uhm I just said it was, right in the last comment. You need an API for letting the apps access the locales, obviously you won't pass the entire files on every application start.

Ok, now I'm confused, but anyway here's what we're planning:

- there will be locale information in the JS API, so the app will be able to check if the whole UI is displayed e.g. in French or in German, and if it includes its own translations for its labels inside the app bundle, it can use some kind of JS i18n library to change the language of the labels

- there (probably) won't be any API that passes any specific translated strings from Hive to the app through the API, because I think there's no way we can prepare any generic set of labels that would be reusable in any significant amount of apps and would cover all copy needed in those apps, and that would probably be more work than it's worth anyway

Hi, I'm just trying to get my head around what this is, and I'm sorry I haven't read too much yet. As I understand it, the hive app is an app which is or will be a bitcoin wallet, but also offers an API for people to create their own bitcoin related games which can be played with the bitcoins in the users wallet. Is that right or am I way off?

Any kind of app, as long as you can do it using javascript, html, and css. It is just a webkit browser embedded there.

Hive is a Bitcoin wallet for Mac OS X :)

Hive wallet also has a API, allowing developers to build apps that live inside the wallet itself, making it easy for Hive users to interact with Bitcoin services directly. Since it's HTML/CSS/JS-based, anything that can run in the browser can be an app.

I'm working on an app for Dabs' charity based on Seans Outpost
https://i.imgur.com/J6sCkof.png

A few updates for Hive app developers:

• apps now run on http://app_name.hiveapp/ instead of http://localhost/app_name - this was changed to prevent apps from reading each other's cookies (but if possible, please don't hardcode the address, just take it from location.href, as we may need to change it again in the future)
• you can now safely use cookies to persist data between sessions (just remember to set a persistent cookie, not a session cookie, i.e. with an expiration date set)
• localStorage does NOT work properly right now and you should not rely on it
• there are bitcoin.VERSION and bitcoin.BUILD_NUMBER properties if you need to check the Hive version
• if you are relying on the fact that Hive disables origin policy check for XHR requests, please don't do that - we'll be removing this in the future (and there will be an API method added instead that will proxy the request for you)
  

　

Also, a few things you might not be aware of:

• Hive has a Webkit inspector enabled, so in any app you can right-click and choose "Inspect" to get access to the JS console
• for easier development, you can replace an archived app bundle in ~/Library/Application Support/Hive/Applications with an unpacked directory with the same name, and the app will work exactly the same

Hello!

My name is Paweł and I'm working on few stuff for Hive Wallet.

http://cl.ly/image/0Y3N3G1y3S3l/Zrzut%20ekranu%202013-12-08%20o%2021.51.06.png

Basic functionality has been implemented. What else would you like to see here?

Greetings from Kraków, Poland!

Maybe some trading methods?

I did something similar with phonegap here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=135392.0

Neat! Would you be interested in porting that to a Hive app? We'd love to get some BTC-E action in there!

To be honest: I have no clue, how hive works...  ;D

But the btc-e stuff is dirt simple. It's just 4 or 5 lines of js with some jsquery mobile and some rough html to display the tables.

The most interesting part would be a nice graph with candles etc. But I never managed to get there. I code java most of the time
and can't even read those candle graphs, so I wrote me my own UI:

https://i.imgur.com/MqHfF.jpg

So I guess, I won't be much help for you...  :(

Any plans to develope a Windows version of hive? I am interested in trying it out and I would be willing to do some beta testing if you needed it.

Three more updates about the API:

• getSystemInfo (https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/wiki/API#getting-information-about-system-settings) - it now includes locale and preferred currency info; the version and build number properties I mentioned before were also moved there (sorry...)
• updateExchangeRate (https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/wiki/API#getting-information-about-fiat-currency-exchange-rates) - you can now get currency exchange rates (e.g. USD/BTC) inside apps
• makeRequest (https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/wiki/API#sending-proxied-requests-to-web-apis) - this should be used to bypass origin policy if a web API doesn't support JSONP or CORS (again, please don't rely on the fact that Hive is currently disabling the origin policy check)

These changes will be available in the next build.

what is the user base for hive now?

Since we are warning people at every turn to be careful with our wallet until it leaves "alpha" stage, there are probably not a lot. However, we will be peeling off those labels very soon and making a wider push.

Still, we do get emails every day asking for support, and we see in those that a lot of people are totally ignoring our warnings and sending thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin using Hive. We don't have any kind of "calling home" feature to tally data, so we cannot be too specific just yet.

Hi Desensitizer! Only if an exceptional Windows developer steps up to help us. It's not something we really know anything about, unfortunately.

This is now available in the latest build on Sparkle and on grabhive.com.

Oh, and one more thing: links with target="_blank" will now open in an external browser instead of just being ignored as before.

Hi there!

First update for Coinbase bundle is here, including currency conversion and transactions history.

Download here: github.com/hivewallet/hiveapp-coinbase (https://github.com/hivewallet/hiveapp-coinbase)

http://cl.ly/image/452h0x29421S/Zrzut%20ekranu%202013-12-10%20o%2022.02.01.png

greenek that's looking really nice!

Does it allow at the moment sending purchased Bitcoin directly to your local Hive wallet? Also we should probably be careful to always say "Coinbase balance" when showing another balance. And that balance should respect the local BTC/mBTC/uBTC setting.

I've been working on a new Bitstamp app in light of both their and our API changes. It's a fairly simple HTML/jQuery app with Bootstrap styling--no compilers/preprocessors are used, so it should be very easy to inspect to design your own app using this as an example. It makes use of several common Hive Wallet API features including: send bitcoins, get user address, and get user locale. Additionally, this is the first app to make use of our new storage API so it will remember your API secret and automatically log you in to your account.

You can follow the project on GitHub at https://github.com/tgerring/hiveapp-bitstamptrader and here's a screenshot (though already outdated):

https://i.imgur.com/QsZqZV6.png

The Sean's Output app has been updated to make use of built-in currency exchange rates, removing the need to interface with BitPay directly.

The updated app can be download from https://github.com/hivewallet/hiveapp-seansoutpost/releases/tag/1.4 and if you're a developer interested in using exchange rates in your app, the API documentation is here (https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/wiki/API#getting-information-about-fiat-currency-exchange-rates).

Sean's Outpost (https://github.com/hivewallet/hiveapp-seansoutpost) and the Support Hive (https://github.com/hivewallet/hiveapp-supporthive) have been updated to use our new formatting & parsing functions (https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/wiki/API#formatting-and-parsing) and respect the user's BTC/mBTC/uBTC unit preference.

 :o

We've added 4 new apps in Hive 1.0 released today:

1) The new Bitstamp app - see above (we've added a detailed wizard/tutorial for creating an API key, since even I had problems with this process...).

2) Coinbase app - you can send and receive money from your Coinbase wallet (including easy transfer between Hive and Coinbase); no buying/selling yet.

https://i.imgur.com/ExCPkQq.png

3) BitPremier app:

https://i.imgur.com/Z4pF4DR.png

4) Prepaid Mobile Recharge app by Umbrel (mobile client of http://spend-a-bit.com):

https://i.imgur.com/8yJ1OFo.png

Yup, I've noticed that too... (https://github.com/hivewallet/hiveapp-bitpremier/issues/3).

Thanks for the great tutorial.. Much appreciated!  :D

Announcing Hive Toolbelt (https://github.com/hivewallet/toolbelt (https://github.com/hivewallet/toolbelt)) - Building Hive apps made easy.

You can install it with `gem install hive-toolbelt`

Currently the toolbelt provides two useful commands:
1) `hive init` # walks you through scaffolding a Hive app
2) `hive package` # creates a .hiveapp bundle from specified or current working directory

Find out more on github: https://github.com/hivewallet/toolbelt (https://github.com/hivewallet/toolbelt). Issues and pull requests are welcome :)

Hi,

a few new things we’ve added to the API:

• bitcoin.installApp - can be used to create “app store” kind of apps that let you install other apps from a given set
• bitcoin.apiVersionMajor/apiVersionMinor - returns current API version (currently 0.1)
• bitcoin.getSystemInfo - added availableCurrencies list, and preferredBitcoinFormat and preferredCurrency that return user’s selected Bitcoin unit and fiat currency
• a few methods for parsing and formatting amounts, see https://github.com/hivewallet/hive-osx/wiki/API#wiki-formatting-and-parsing

Also, the same-origin policy hack is disabled now, so XHR requests to external domains will not work unless the server supports CORS or JSONP - use bitcoin.makeRequest in those cases.

Hive for Android beta has been released:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=608891.0

The integrated app store app has been updated to reflect some Android changes.

To app developers:

Yes, Hive Web (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=663832.0;all) will soon support apps. We are not dropping them.