I am working on a website which have display problem when browsing from the messenger, facebook or instagram in-app browser. Since we are running ad campaign on those platform and we can not force the APP to use the phone browser, we have to fix it.
However it is not easy to test / fix since it is not about browsing the website on a specific device using the phone browser, but installing instagram app on the phone and browse from the in-app browser. Also it is not Samsung or iPhone device which I would have been able to emulate with xcode or android studio
is it something I can do without buying the physical device ? like an emulator for multiple device ?
I am using this tool https://github.com/microsoft/VoTT. This tool is written in react/redux.
If the tool is running as web application, it does not have the option to access local file system (i.e., the computer that the browser is running). If the tool is running as an electron app, then the local system is accessible.
The question is more about how to allow the web app to access local file system.
You've answered yourself in the question. :)
As it stands today (October 2020), there is not a standard API to access the file system from a web browser without using an extended "browser" (like Electron). There is however a W3C Draft to add this capability to web browsers.
I was trying to start to learn about programming on Firefox OS, and I heard that it is programmed with JavaScript and HTML5, and it uses the same structures of web apps.
Said that, I'm doing a course on Udacity ( I'm a beginner) that is about web development, and it talked about how to use the Google App Engine(we just made our own websites online, using python and some structures of the GAE), and I tryied to make some relationship with what I was seeing in the Firefox website, and I just coundn't figure out nothing.
Google App Engine is a "platform as a service model" of webapps. What you don't need is the key. You don't need :
a Database Administrator
Network technician
a Backup Admin (you still need to make backups of your app and data but not your network config files ect...)
the hardware at your company
the ISP service level agreements
there is more that Google specifically puts in over other platform as a service businesses.
Google takes care of this for you. You just write the webapp (and back it up for a rainy day)
As for Firefox OS, you build application, as you wrote, with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript: only web technology. Those are web applications that you build to run on Firefox OS devices, and even in the browser, depending on the API you used. The application you build https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps, can be either hosted on your own server, or if you packaged it, on the Firefox OS marketplace https://marketplace.firefox.com/.
I would also like to add that Google App Engine is a PaaS at the end of the day. So while technically, one can say that any web application should run, that is not always the case.
If you are using a PaaS, whether it is a Google App Engine or any others like Heroku, CloudFoundry, etc - you must understand the various Services and APIs that it provides in the different platforms that it supports. For e.g. using Google App Engine, you can choose either Java, Python or PHP to write and host your web applications. However, you have to use some of its services like Datastore, etc.
Moving any web application that you have written to a PaaS is not always straightforward. Except for the most simplistic apps that print a "Hello World", there are chances that you atleast have to do the following things:
Migrate parts of your application to utilize the Platform Services/APIs
Rearchitect parts of your application to take maximum advantage of the Cloud i.e. multi-tenancy, Scaling, etc.
You could treat Google App Engine(GAE) as web server hosting with specific web framework (python or java), which can host any normal webapps.
Firefox OS webapps are written with normal web skills. So you can use GAE to 'host' Firefox webapps.
(GAE is also mentioned as one of hosting place in Mozilla Developer Network
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Trash/Publishing_the_app )
The evil detail is Firefox webapp need an extra 'manifest.webapp' file that need extra MIME host settings
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/x-web-app-manifest+json'
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Developing/Manifest#Serving_manifests
Then you are ready to host Firefox Webapp on GAE :)
Is it possible / feasible to develop social applications with Corona SDK? I am talking about applications like Path, or a more feature rich application like Facebook for iOS?
We are going to develop a mobile application but don't want to assign resources for both iOS and Android versions of the software.
Maybe I should give more information about our project.
Users will use device camera, location services and there will be lots of web service calls as expected.
You can access the the camera as well. See the media.show() API Call: http://docs.coronalabs.com/api/library/media/show.html
Your web service access will be using the network.request() API call.
It is possible. Though I'm not sure about device camera but you can use location services and you can also develop a client side in corona
For Vellamo Mobile Benchmark, the HTML5 Chapter evaluates mobile web browser performance.
When running the benchmark, does it test using the default browser?
If there are several browsers installed on the Android device, how are other browsers configured to test on Vellamo?
The Vellamo HTML5 Chapter benchmarks the WebView component. It's the web engine used in the "Browser" APP as well as thousands of other APPS, which use it as layouting engine or to render online content.
Because of a limitation in the Android framework, Vellamo cannot test other Browsers. In Android 4.0 (I believe), the framework was adapted so that users could be able to switch to different web engines (for example Chrome), but afaik there is no simple way to activate this new behavior. I believe that in the future, Android will allow to select different web engines and if that happens Vellamo will probably offer the option to benchmark them.