Seems like the answer to how to position components in Sencha Touch / Ext JS, especially with percentage or proportionally is pretty much to use some type of container with a layout type.
This seems like a step backwards to me - similar to what HTML Tables were for web page layouts. Create a containing structure that controls the layout and in each "cell" you have some content.
Specifically, if you have a component that you don't want SIZED based on these rules, only positioned - that is essentially what all the Sencha Touch / Ext JS approaches seem to be.
Layout type hbox, vbox, columns, flex layout, anchor. They all create containers around your components, instead of just directly positioning your components.
Am I missing something integral, or is this really the way it is?
Besides from the obvious problem of over-nesting, it seems like a more complicated approach, and creates a dependency between each component and the other components on the page.
I would like to have a way to say "this component is 30% from the top and 20% from the side", potentially also sizing the components using percentage - but not always.
The percentage / proportion approach is a must if you're developing for multiple devices.
If you are just getting started with Sencha Touch, it is easy to get caught up in the huge amounts of markup it creates. The key to developing in Sencha Touch is to let it do its thing and allow yourself to do things the 'Sencha Touch Way'.
Also, feel free to add classes to the components you are creating. You can manipulate these with CSS almost like a normal website.
Go through the docs. The frameworks have been around for a while, so, your issues with it have probably already been addressed.
Related
My first attempt at a RWD site was for a simple one-page site for an NFT project. It didn't use media queries, but many lines similar to: max(value, calc(vw*x)) for margins, padding, font-size, etc.
I also was dependent on Javascript. If the screen was <400px I might have a header bar anchored to the top with a profile pic left, title center, hamburger menu right, content underneath. If the resolution was larger socials appeared in one spot, if larger, in the footer. If the screen was over ... 600px, I lost the top header bar; title became the first line in the main content area; hamburger popup menu now a permanent fixture as left navbar, PFP floated left in the content area.
Being new, is this good or bad? I only hear people speak of flex boxes and grids. Not rearranging layouts with JS. Since the layout and content is essentially within JS code, any attempt at SEO for naught?
Using max() and calc() can work for simple layouts, but can become difficult to maintain for more complex layouts. Flexbox and Grid is more effective and efficient for creating responsive layouts. When it comes to SEO, it's important to ensure that your content is accessible to search engines by including it in the HTML of your page.
Javascript is great for making pages dynamic and obviously improving some UX things, but you should know where and when to use it.
You should definitely use CSS and media query for responsiveness on your page. There are a lot of frameworks or libraries that make the css writing process a lot less painful (I use Tailwindcss and I think is a good one).
And as for SEO, if you create a page based entirely on javascript, you will find a lot of difficulties in this area. You should read about server-side rendering, which may help you to improve this.
Today we have a lot of tools that can help you with this, if you use React you have Nextjs, if you use Vue you have Nuxjs and so on.
I'm currently putting together a PoC for the web. I've done about 9 years of iOS development so I think in those contexts/concepts. What I need to build is something similar to a UIScrollView/CATiledLayer for the web.
I need to build out a tool that allows users to build their own flowcharts, something I've already built on iOS. I'm prototyping on the web and I'm not sure where to get started. I've played around with a few canvas libraries thus far.
I want to build something that can have a fixed viewport with other components rendered off-screen. The viewport has fixed bounds that you can expand and allows me to put subcomponents in the view and move them around if I'd like to.
My web/javascript experience is pretty much Ember, React and plain old ES5/ES6. My HTML skills aren't that strong and I think I may have missed something fundamental.
My goal is to have something that can work with an existing react stack my company uses. I'm happy to roll my own solution but would love to get advice about the right direction to pursue. I feel like I have almost nil domain knowledge in this area.
This JS library, Dracula should be of great help to you since you're working with drag and drop flowcharts. You can see a working example here. NOTE: This lib is based on SVG and doesn't use canvas.
Here's another beautiful live demo: Source code for JS Flowchart here
Also take a look at this Dragon drop fiddle
And regarding ScrollView in HTML, you can simply use divs with css styles overflow-y: scroll and/or overflow-x: scroll. Using flex layouts, apart from giving you mobile-like development feel, will help you have so much control over your layouts based on the screen size.
Hope this should get you started.
I used Highslide JS about 5 years ago on this site: http://wela.ctc.edu/academy12-13.aspx (example page). Now I'm redesigning the site use Twitter.Bootstrap and am trying to figure out how I can tweak the Highslide popups to work in a small device width. Is this possible or should I use find another solution to implement? I've played around with the setting parameters in my highslide-with-html.js file, but the results have been unsatisfactory. If it is possible to use Highslide in a responsive design, would be grateful for any URLs to look at.
The short answer is that Highslide adapts very well to small devices if you're opening images. The expander is purpose-built to do just that - display the image as large as it can without exceeding the boundaries of the viewport.
But when opening anything else - an expander with HTML content, an iframe, etc. - the expander must initially be a fixed size. You can put a resize handle on it, but that's not really good enough for handling everything from a smartphone to a large monitor.
Without rewriting Highslide JS, overcoming this limitation would require that your page do its own detection of the viewport size, then either modify the call to htmlExpand() on the fly, probably with some jQuery manipulation, or change the .highslide-html CSS class width. The latter approach (targeting the CSS) seems like it would be easier.
In my app, there is going to be a page that occupies the whole window (i.e. you can't scroll in any direction, the page resizes itself to the window size). I'm sure I can do some CSS trickery to achieve that, but this page is also going to contain some resizable areas. Basically there will be a sidebar that the user can make wider (within a min-max range).
Essentially what I'm trying to do is recreate this page if you select "Border" under Basic Layouts. I'm at a bit of a loss about how to do this. Should I try introducing some jQuery UI, or is there a purely AngularJS was to do it?
I know I haven't provided any code, so I'm not expecting anyone to give me the full working code. But a nudge in the right direction would be great!
No, there isn't a "pure" AngularJS way to do it without writing some new code or adding a framework to the mix such as you mentioned. I'd suggest looking at the more popular UI frameworks and see how they fit (maybe jQueryUI, or even Sencha).
Additionally, you sh/could write a directive to wrap your usage of the component to black-box it a bit more and be in the spirit of AngularJS (& so that you could more easily replace it in the future).
Given that type of functionality can be a bit tricky to create cross-browser (depending on browsers supported), it's probably best left to others who've done it.
A bit late but guess it is what you wanted AngularJS UI Layout
A borderlayout or splitterlayout plugin with AngularJS.
I want to build a mobile site in Sencha which showing HTML content on a tablet device, containing many objects/divisions/containers with similar layouts and properties.
Take this example window:
Is there a best practice or recommended way to achieve reusability and DRY for writing those containers in Sencha Touch 2?
What types of objects would you use? Does it make sense to use HTML div objects + CSS?
Also, does it make sense to use Sencha in this case?
Here is how you would achieve that layout using Sencha Touch:
Unfortunately it is pretty hard to explain, but hopefully it makes sense.
I've also created a very simple example of this layout, viewable here: http://www.senchafiddle.com/#jxiA8 (make sure you press Run).
As for which objects/components; they would all be Ext.Containers. Ideally you would use the MVC structure to create custom classes (which would extend Ext.Container) for each of these items.
This is definitely a great use case for Sencha Touch. It is great for creating rich applications like this.
Best approach to render the list of items in the Orange and Yellow containers is probably with a DataView.
Relying on itemTpl to draw each item as per the official documentation of the Ext.dataview.DataView component or using an item renderer, as per the dive into dataview article. (Note that the code in that article may not work as sencha as changed a lot between the different beta versions - #rdougan's associated demo on github may be more recent).
I did expand on the layout code contributed by #rdougan to add an example of how to implement the Reusable dataviews (gist).
That demo code also contains a quickly baked solution for data injection (applyStore and injectStore), so to make it possible to define an "OrangeContainer" once and only once and pass down different data for the "highlighted" and "list" versions of the views at the top and bottom of the screen, respectively. I have no idea whether this is a good or reliable way to do it. I would be interested in feedback on this.