Is there a way to have your Android native app or Mirror API app bypass default gestures, such as touch-hold does not load the Google search screen?
No, although a better response might be, not yet. The Glass Development Kit (GDK) described at I/O 2013 didn't mention this capability, but it still may show up.
Unfortunately, at this time, it's speculation as to what the GDK will contain or what the Mirror API may evolve into.
It may be worth looking through the existing issues (or even entering an issue yourself) to see if what you're looking for has been requested as a feature enhancement.
Related
Background
While this is not a theoretical question, I would like to ask for suggestions on how to best approach the modularization of features of a mobile app.
If it helps, I usually use Ionic for mobile app development, so it would be great if the best practices would work with Ionic, but any general recommendation and suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Ionic is a cross-platform mobile app development framework that supports creating Android and iOS apps using Angular / TypeScript.
Problem
Let us assume we have an application that lets users register for an account. Upon registration, this application will offer various services to the user, a really wide variety. Let's say the user can receive notifications (both in-app pages and push notifications), receive discount coupons (either from coupons given by the admin using a management dashboard, or via doing things such as achieving a certain amount of steps recorded by the app as a pedometer, etc), and various other features.
Having so many features in an app will make it huge indeed, and since as a software development company, we would like to tailor the app so that it can provide what a client needs, and not provide the other things.
The problem in short becomes something like:
What is the best way to separate the different features of an app, make it modular and non-dependent on each-other so that some features can be easily disabled and the others enabled?
Is there a way so that the disabled features are not included at all in the resulting compiled app?
My own idea
The most logical way I can think of right now is to have a core app that includes all features. The features are enabled (shown in the app menu bar) by configuring the app's build environment file; for example, setting coupons: false, would cause all coupon-related feature to not get enabled most probably by using if statements and ngIf directives around the app. This core app will have all features enabled by default, but once a client requests for a specific app configuration, a new Git branch will be created from the latest branch, configured to the client's needs, and remain as a separate branch (or project).
However, my boss has complained that "that solution sounds like it's coming from the year 2010, there has to be another way," and unfortunately, I can't think of anything better than this. There will definitely also be design changes (like logos, color themes, and layout changes and font size changes) that can never be customized just by changing flags on a build environment file (is there? Maybe I'm the one who doesn't know.) so I don't know how to support those by using something 'better than Git'.
Conclusion
Modularization of an app by implementing various features as modules so that they can easily be enabled or disabled upon client request is probably feasible in some way, but I'm not sure if there is something better than Git in order to facilitate the management of different versions. My boss seems to be expecting it to be as easy as the flick of a switch (and enabling/disabling features can probably be made to be this easy), but attending to the unique needs of the client (text, design, layout, etc differences) is quite hard to do as easily.
I would be really thankful for any suggestions, or ideas on how to approach this scenario.
Thank you very much!
I've to share a mobile screen and display it on a browser using WebRTC. I then have to take control of the mobile screen.
I've researched this and know I can share a screen browser to browser using chrome(with extension) or firefox(after certain flags are set). Some information I've read suggests that screen sharing on mobile is not possible and then another article said it was but I think they meant be sharing through the chrome browser on a mobile.
Some of the the information and posts I read are dating back to 2013/2015/2016 and I wondered if there is any new information on this?
Is screen sharing on mobile devices(android or iOS) possible using webrtc now?
is screen control on mobile devices possible?
Thanks Andrea
I also investigated this topic a few days ago and it seems to me we are on the verge of the next step and the technology hasn't totally settled yet. Screencapture is mostly working with (very) up-to-date browsers and (still) an extension or some kind of white-listing. I could not find any kind of hint that a "remote control" mechanisms are part of webrtc and the getUserMedia implementations. Unfortunately.
ICE seems to work fine for most scenarios (if you don't mind waiting a minute) and Tickled ICE adresses the problem in an interesting way.
Mobile is very confusing indeed as the market is even more heterogeneous.
Maybe we should open a wiki or a chat channel or whatnot they habe nowadays on stackoverflow :-) I think I will have to read about this "community wiki" checkbox down there...
The most promising thing I could find was
https://inthelocus.com/
Still trying it out in different scenarios.
[This might not be an answer...] I was on the same topic and then I noticed there's an existing tool (SDK) to serve the similar purpose: https://cobrowse.io. It works good in both the demo video and the simulator web page. Yet I'm not sure if it utilises WebRTC...
I was talking to another developer recently and we started to discuss Window Phone 7 development. Their thoughts, from what they had heard (i.e no hands on knowledge) was it was really just Silverlight development. My reaction was that I see a lot of posts these days regarding Silverlight that call out being for "Windows Phone 7" so there must be some distinctions between the two.
So what I'm wondering is what are the differences between developing for WP7 v. the browser plugin.
The things I can think of, but seem obvious are:
WP7 Silverlight version isn't the same SL 4.0 but more like SL 3.5+
the hardware is different (memory\cpu)
I assume there are some different controls
you need to take into account the form factor
Not discounting the above list, which are important, but what else is different when developing a Silverlight application for WP7 v. browser plugin?
Thanks
There are a lot of technical differences and sure there are plenty here who give you bullet list of these. However there are really just a few real differences that make a big difference to how you develop apps for WP7.
Its a touch interface people
Quite a few apps I've played with from the market place seem to have developers struggling to grasp the concept of a touch based interface. Its clear that many are still using the left mouse down event when they ought to be looking for a "Tap" gesture. This can be frustrating for users trying to "flick" and find they've "clicked" instead.
So make sure you are using a gesture based framework (toolkit has one) so you don't annoy the users.
Your app will tombstone
WP7 guards its resources jealously. At a moments notice your app may be deactivate as the search screen or start screen is invoked. Volatile state of your app will be lost. WP7 API includes a number of ways of keeping key small chunks of data when your app gets "tombstoned" so that when the user returns to it, it should be able to restore near enough the same state it had before. However this isn't done auto-magically you have to code for it.
Again some of the apps in the market place don't handle this well and when you have an Omnia 7 which has a seriously sensitive search button that can be really frustrating.
Network access and other services are intermittent
If you are developing a connected app you need to cope gracefully with changing network access or loss of access all together.
Read the manual
Whilst there are plenty of resources get devs up and running real quick the devil is always in the detail. I recommend you at least start with reading Fundamental Concepts for Windows Phone which will cover some of these issues.
TBH there are a lot. Some of them:
Touch input vs Mouse clicks
Sounds and music
Silverlight 4.0 "/content/song.wma"
Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 "content/song.wav" (mind the slash)
Navigation philosophy
WP7 SL has two threads by default. One (compositor thread) runs all animation, second (UI Thread) runs the rest.
Controls have very diffrent default behavior and look
and many other OS realated
Better than any explanation, you should refer to the official website.
Silverlight for WP has support for (according to the same doc):
Hardware acceleration for video and graphics
Accelerometer for motion sensing
Multi-touch
Camera and microphone
Location awareness
Push notifications
Native phone functionality
It doesn't have regular COM bindings and it has somewhat limited access to reflection, among all restrictions.
For a complete list of features supported in Silverlight for Windows Phone, read this document.
I've been developing a travel planning site - tripgrep.com - which is built on appengine, GWT and smartgwt, among other technologies. It is still early days, and the site is now working well on my development environment, which is either a windows or mac computer.
However, I am frequently talking up the website to my friends when we are at a bar or other venue, so I am standing there while they try to access the site via an iPhone, Android or Blackberry - I've witnessed all three. It has been painfully obvious that the browser based frontend takes a long time to download on a mobile device. I am pretty sure this is because of the javascript download for SmartGWT.
So, I would like to look at alternatives to SmartGWT.
What I like about SmartGWT is that it has a reasonable look and feel out of the box - I don't need to learn any design or css and it has an office application look. This is considerably better than the GWT built-in widgets, which just get a blue border. The better look-and-feel is why I went with SmartGWT early on. However, the slow load times are killing me on these mobile demos. So now I want a fast loading widget alternative that has good look-and-feel out of the box.
The features I care about are: tabs, good form layout, Google maps API integration, grid data viewing. If those are all available in a library that loads quickly on a mobile device, then that's the library I want.
Your best bet is probably just to use the standard GWT widgets and learn how to style them to your liking. SmartGWT's automatic styling is nice, but as you've noticed, it comes with a price.
Even GWT's standard widgets, which are lighter, could still be trimmed down for maximum speed, so if you're really adventurous you could roll your own light-weight widgets that do only what you need them to do.
You can try mgwt-also called mobile gwt...(available at http://code.google.com/p/mgwt/ )
You could write a wrapper for jqTouch... that would be cool.
Write a seperate View for your model, specifically for either a) mobile devices or b) iPhone speicfically (see "iui" f.ex.). That is the very best way to do it.
Since the launch of Silverlight 2 I was expecting a lot of full blown Silverlight applications popping up but still there seem to be little evidence of this. Does anybody know of such applications out there in the wild. And also what would be the obvious applications you would develop in Silverlight. I would say mail clients are bad examples as they just as well could be written as a web/ajax app. As Silverlight is far more powerful than web+ajax possible candidates should be impossible/akward implementing as a web/ajax app.
The ones that comes to my mind is
Photo and imaging editing apps
Reporting applications
Office applications, Word/Excel...
Edit:
Added from posts
Games
The point isn't that the app need to fill the whole screen just that it isn't just a small part of a webpage, or you could call it a full blown application running inside the webbrowser, only using the webbrowser as a host.
I think the Medical app that Microsoft itself developed shows pretty well what could be achieved with silverlight http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/
As for image editing then as I understand its a bit difficult as Silverlight lacks a Bitmap API to be able to do per pixel image editing...
Edit:
I noticed you added Word/Excel to your question and there comes the problem that Silverlight doesn't have a rich text editor built in and there hasn't been real good examples of custom implementations. There is one http://www.codeplex.com/richtextedit but I haven't seen any applications that actually use it.
I'm working on one in the medical domain.
This started as an update of a Mac classic application but due to the amount of work involved, broadened to considering other toolkits. I convinced them to go for an initial WPF desktop port to be followed by a Silverlight version.
I don't know one so far, but I could imagine that it could be used in a kind like the fullscreen video playback on youtube.
How many fullscreen desktop apps are there? Most application don't need the entire screen. If you don't want to be distracted by menus and taskbars and so you go fullscreen. Another type of applications that can use fullscreen are games.
You are limited in fullscreen to certain key presses such as arrow keys, tab, enter, and space so this rules out some of those types of apps. They have done this for security reasons so an app can't hijack the screen and record the keypresses, but I wish they could come up with a scheme to sufficiently warn the user then allow it if they consent.
An application Microsoft seem to like to show case is the AOL mail client written entirely in silverlight.
Personally I follow the rule is if you would not write it in flash you would not write it in silverlight preferring AJAX in most cases. In the past most large flash application have failed such as the flash word processor (cant remember the name) while AJAX enabled applications such as google documents have taken off.
Finally I believe until moonlight (linux and mac support) has been released and more general users have silverlight downloaded developers will be reluctant to use it widely even for smaller apps and gadgets.