Does anyone know how widely WTAI is supported in mobile phones, or can point to a list of supported devices.
The great majority of device support some WTAI primitives (because they are include in WAP). Those are current supported: WTAPublic.makeCall, WTAPublic.sendDTMF and WTAPublic.addPBEntry
More information here and here.
I came across a couple resources on device capabilities today.
DeviceAtlas
and
WURFL
It depends on what you are hoping to use WTAPI for.
If it is for a wap site then check out Device Atlas or WURFL, or Mobile elements
The next problem that we have is after you have the click to call link, you need to track it we have done this in the past using a service like OnSip.
Whereby each call goes to OnSip then they forward the call onto the correct number they then call to a url hosted on our servers whenever a call comes through enabling us to track the number of people who clicked on the click to call link
Related
Is there a way to get all current system DNS resolver ip-addresses in codename one?
The classes NetworkManager and ConnectionRequest don't provide these information.
In general Codename One seems not to provide any way to access a devices communication status information like "Wi-Fi Mac address", "IMEI", "Mobile network type" etc. Am I right?
Do you mean something like Socket.getHostOrIP()?
There is no standardized explicit DNS lookup API though.
Most of these things aren't available across platform or even consistently within the platform. You can use Display's getProperty with "IMEI", "UDID" & "MSISDN". But that will only have any chance of working on Android and you will probably need to add the build hint for permissions.
You can also always use native code calls as explained in the developer guide and the How Do I? video.
I would suggest that you revisit your need to get these values and evaluate a way around them. E.g most advertisers no longer require them as they aren't provided by all mobile OS's.
I am planning to develop a hybrid mobile app using ionic. One of the features i need is offline google map. Is there a way how to do it?
It depends on the requirements of your application whether this will be possible. Are your users on "modern" devices A.K.A is HTML5 fully supported? Do your users need to view/edit the map globally, or just in a specific area? Does the map really need to be provided by google? I'll address some issues below to point you in possible takes on this problem.
Do you really need google maps? (Most optimal scenerio)
First of, do you really need google maps? Also relevant: how far do your users need to zoom their maps? If it can be any maps, and zooming is not really of high priority (if it is, including all map tiles will make the app eat all storage), you could probably use map-tiles as a packaged part of your app, and display them with a library like http://leafletjs.com/. The library is well documented, and provides a map-interface for a variety of map-providers. It will be do-able to configure this to use your own local map-tiles. You could include map-tiles for multiple zoom levels if necessary, and limit the min/max zoom-levels to the tiles you actually have available. This will make your maps work offline.
I can't or don't wan't to provide my own tiles make sure that you really looked into the option, there is systems out there that provide map-tiles you could use (check https://www.mapbox.com/ for example)
Okay, so you really don't want to do what I suggested. What are the options now? Javascript mapping-solutions typically render tiles based on the location of the map you want to see and the zooming level. These tiles are requested to the tile-provider. I do not know how to implement this for google exactly, you might need some research on this - I'll try to help you see a direction. There will be requests to get the tiles from the servers. I checked with http://maps.google.com what images are loaded when trying to navigate the map: (example (click)). Find out what url's are used in your situation, we will need these kind of url's later (just inspect the network tab in your browser console and see which requests are made when scrolling in your map). When we only need our users to work in a certain area when offline we could use service workers to cache the responses of these requests when we are online, and serve those caches when we are offline. Read more on service workers here (click).
Advantage: Real offline map-functionality for any tile you visited before (as long as your cache wasn't overflown, depending on your implementation of the service workers, and for service-worker supported browsers/devices).
Disadvantages: No support for tiles that were never put in the cache (AKA: never seen before). Another one: this will only work for devices that support service workers. Might be an option in situations where you either don't care about users using "older" devices, or where you can control the user's device choices. Note that using crosswalk could ease your developing efforts here, since you only have to consider one browser-runtime then: but crosswalk also doesn't support older devices.
However: This solution could be fine for people that will need to work in a specific area, which might be true for the case provided by #vipul-r If you or your users know in advance where they need their maps to work, you can instruct/help them in loading & caching their maps correctly.
If you can't work on either of these 2 solutions, then I highly doubt there will be a way to do it. I don't see any other way to the best of my knowledge.
I have a ContextualMenuPlugin and an application. When user clicks the option from context menu i need to send a message to my app. In windows i achieved this using sendmessage() function. But i'm new to MAC OS X. Can any one please help me, by giving some api's or functions which will enlighten this situation?
You have plenty of choices on how to get messages into an application on your Macintosh.
The ways I'm thinking of include Apple Events or sockets or kqueues, but there's other stuff I've never even worked with that might even be more useful & appropriate (such as Distributed Objects). Check out this duplicate and/or related question and maybe you'll see a useful answer in there for you that you can build upon.
B.T.W.: how did you construct your Contextual Menu Plugin? Is it in Carbon or Objective C or is it some codeless plugin or plist or? The answer to that question probably will dictate a lot towards how you will be able to talk from your plugin to your app.
If you want to control just your application you might want to look into AppleScript. Using that solution has the added benefit that your users could also use it to automate things via scripting.
I am researching best practices for developing 'classic' style mobile sites, i.e., mobile sites that are delivered and experienced as mobile HTML pages vs. small JavaScript applications (jQuery Mobile, Sencha, etc.).
There are two prevailing approaches:
Deliver the same page structure (HTML) to all mobile devices, then use CSS media queries or JavaScript to improve the experience for more capable devices.
Deliver an entirely different page structure (and possibly content) to devices with enhanced capabilities.
I'm specifically interested in best practices for the second approach. Two good examples are:
MIT's mobile site: different for Blackberries and feature(less) phones than for iOS & Android devices, but available at the same URLs -- http://m.mit.edu/
CNN's mobile site: ditto -- http://m.cnn.com/
I'd like to hear from people here at SO have actually worked on something like this, and can explain what the best practices are for delivering this type of device-dependent structure/content/experience.
I don't need a primer on mobile user-agent detection, or WURFL, or any of the concepts covered in other (great) SO threads like this one. I've used jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch and I'm familiar with most approaches for delivering the final mobile experience, so no pointers required there either thanks.
What I really would like to understand is: how these specific types of experiences are delivered in terms of server-side detection and delivery based on user-agent groups -- where there's one stripped down page structure (different HTML) delivered to one group of devices, and another richer type of HTML document delivered to newer devices, but both at the same sub-domain / URLs.
Hope that all makes sense. Many thanks in advance.
At NPR, we use a server side 'application' to serve up the correct html/css/etc depending on if the user is on a high-end device or a lower-tier phone.
So, when a mobile device pings an npr.org page, our servers use a user-agent detection method to point them to the corresponding m.npr.org. Once directed to the m.npr.org URL, the web app - which is written in groovy, but I think could potentially be a number of things - sends back either the touch version of the site or the more simple, stripped down content. The choice of the web app is made based at least somewhat on the WURFL data.
I don't have enough rep points to post a comparison with screenshots, so I'll have to point you to the sites themselves.
You can see this in your desktop browser by typing in m.npr.org to see the stripped down site. And you can override the default device detection by adding the parameter ?devicegate.client=iPhone_3_0 to see the touch version you would see if you just went to npr.org on your smartphone. If you view the source, you can see how different html & css is being served at the same subdomain.
Hope it helps seeing something like this in the wild. Does that make sense?
A common way to detect which format a mobile device needs is the accept header:
application/xhtml+xml > xhtml
text/vnd.wap.wml > Old wml wap pages
.
.
.
On newer devices which can handle all the desktop html formats, you can use the user agent.
Then you have to ask yourself what you want to do:
Switch to another Stylesheet (only works with newer devices).
Switch to another view logic, like building wml page templates.
Switch to a complete other page.
I think the second approach is the best one. Many web frameworks make it easy to switch to another view logic without rewriting the rest (the mvc pattern in its glory).
I have two examples for you.
Read up on how facebook achieves this using XHP to give abstract different output for different markups: One Mobile Site to Serve Thousands of Phones
There will be a lot of good stuff in their actual implementation which I wish was available.
I use a framework called HawHaw, which let's you write your app once (in PHP Objects or XML files) and it outputs the correct markup to the device based on a few checks (accept header, agent string etc).
I am designing a Point-Of-Sale system for a small shop. The shop just have one Point-Of-Sale but often they are one to three users (sellers) in the shop. Each user have their own user account in the system so they login and logout very often. How should I design the login/logout system in a good way?
For the moment the users don't use passwords, because it takes so long time to type the password each time they login.
The Platform is Windows Vista but I would like to support Windows 7 too. We use Active Directory on the Network. The system is developed in Java/Swing for the moment, but I'm thinking about to change to C#.NET/WPF.
I am thinking about an SmartCard solution, but I don't know if that fits my situation. It would be more secure (which I like) but I don't know if it will be easy to implement and smooth to use, i.e. can I have the POS-system running in the background or started very quickly when the users switch? Are SmartCard solutions very expensive? (My customers are small shops) Is it preferred to use .NET or Java in a SmartCard solution?
What other solutions do I have other than passwords/no passwords/smartcards?
How should I design the login/logout system in a good way?
Is there any good solution using SmartCards for this purpose?
I would like suggested solutions both for C#.NET/WPF and Java/Swing platforms.
I would like suggested solutions both for Active Directory solutions and solutions that only use one user profile in Windows.
How is this problem solved in similar products? I have only seen password-solutions, but they are clumsy.
An interesting solution is to use "Fast User Switching", i.e. the capability to have multiple user sessions open on the same PC. The POS software could be launched through the Startup folder of each seller account and would stay active in each seller session.
I thought that being in a domain (i.e. using Active Directory) disables Fast User Switching, but according to The old new thing, this was true on XP only. I just checked with my Win7 machine at work: it is in a domain but still has the "switch user" menu item.
The main advantage is that if your software is already multi-user aware, you don't need to change it.
I should have made the Fast User Switching check before writing what is below, because this seems to be the simplest solution. Here are other ideas, anyway.
Another solution is what you mention of having a single Windows user but several "virtual users" that your application manages. A smart card is a good way to implement a pseudo-login. In C++, the API allows detecting the removal or insertion of a card, so the application could detect this and read the card after insertion to know who's currently in front of the computer. .NET can easily call this API through P/Invoke; I don't know much of Java, except that JNI could be a solution to call the native API if there is no managed library that publishes this capability.
What should be done is researching the different types of card and how to talk to them, as your app should use a card that does not require a PIN to be accessed (or you are back to the slow login system, except if tying a 4-digit number is not considered too slow).
I've seen restaurants where waiters insert a key into the cash register in order to be identified. I googled "cash registers" but could only find a complete solution package, rather than the components like a key reader.
An almost idiotic question is: how much security do you need ? Does it make sense to have big buttons on the first screen of the app, where people click in order to tell the system who they are ? When they are done, they click on a "Finish" button and the app goes back to the "identify" screen. I've put this at the end because it is so simplistic that it has a low probability of being useful.
I'm not familiar with a broad range of smart card provider solutions, but I know Gemalto has a .Net friendly setup. Most others are geared to Java, but support is widening.
With regards to switching user sessions and your application, it depends on how "heavy" your application is. If your app requires quite a bit of start-up time / resources then you might consider creating the basic application as a service on the machine which can run in the background continuously and then you can load a light-weight UI to interact with the service with each user session (maybe launch via Startup menu).
There is a C# project on CodeProject which provides a framework for interacting with smart card services in windows - might be interesting reading.
I had a chance to work with the Open Source Computer Vision library (OpenCV)
in one of my past projects and its "Face-Recognition" is what you're after. It is written using native code, but can be easily used with Java, .NET, Android, iOS. All you need is a webcam and a button "Switch User" with the onClickListener that will take a picture and compare it with the images of your employees. Advantage? Once the picture's taken, it gets processed in less than 10ms. And as Timores mentioned earlier, once the face is recognised, you simply switch the session. Simple yet effective solution. Good luck!
maybe you want to think about using barcode scanner... probably you already have this device on POS ... my software for bars and restaurants use barcode scanner to recognize users. You have 2 options for using: first, user must log in with own barcode card, then he can use the application ... the second is better, everyone can use application, but to print the receipt user must use barcode card. After then he is responsible for that amount on this receipt.