Dynamically pushing information to Estimote Beacons? - estimote

I'm thinking of an interface that allows changing what the beacon displays, on the fly. For instance, a web interface that lets me choose between various items as well as a beacon -- and any mobile devices in proximity to that beacon display the item I chose.
Similarly, if I change the item on the web interface, the beacon should update. Looking at the API docs, I don't think this sort of thing would be possible?

https://developer.estimote.com/managing-beacons/bulk-updater/
https://community.estimote.com/hc/en-us/articles/200868188-How-to-modify-iBeacon-s-UUID-Major-and-Minor-values-
Try updating the uids and linking dynamically to custom named content that you want to push. Even a slight firmware update might do the trick.

Related

Can 8thWall Web ( i.e. 8thWall integrated in amazon sumerian application for Browser) do marker based tracking or marker recognition successfully?

I am looking to create a WebAR app which recognizes custom image markers and show content augmented on top of them, have looked in to "blippar" and "zappar" both of which are a no go because of pricing.
8th Wall and amazon sumerian combo seems the best solution forward, but since 8th wall has multiple solutions for platforms. none of the documentation is satisfying enough to clarify if what i want to achieve is possible using it for the web.
Finally, After actually developing the application using 8th Wall and sumerian, Here is my answer to the feasibility of this option-
Yes, 8thWall provides proper marker based WebAR solution for amazon sumerian, They have a very active slack channel which you should join, It contains code snippets to primary issues faced by users in the chat history.

How to select keyboard in Tizen/HTML5 for Wearables

I have two system wide keyboards pre-installed on my Tizen Wearable device, the first one is a stock Samsumg's keyboard, the second one - Custom. The first one is a user's default selected in Settings.
I don't want to change the system's default, but I want my application to use the Custom keyboard.
In native API I've seen Tizen::Ui::InputConnection object that can be used as a property in Edit or TextArea controls, but I didn't see anything like this in HTML5 API. Searching Tizen's forum didn't help.
I've also seen in Tizen's SDK IME's WebHelperClient example a number of undocumented commands used to talk to a Tizen's service through a websocket. Probably there is a command to select an active keyboard, but I didn't find it.
Any leads are appreciated.
IMO that is not possible for either web apps or native apps.
Reason:
1. In gear, simultaneously two Keyboard can't be active at the same time.
Also, suppose there is an API available which you can use to change to custom keyboard while your app is running, but what if you close your application not using the normal hardware exit(i.e. Swiping down), rather you close it from "Recent Applications" then the custom keyboard that you activated for your app will be set for other applications as well.
Also the documentation available here doesn't explain anything which you are asking
https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/guides/web-application/tizen-features/ime-application

a/b testing a major html/css redesign

At my company we are redesiging our e-commerce website. HTML and CSS is re-written from the ground up to make the website responsive / mobile friendly.
Since it concerns one of our biggest websites which is responsible for generating of over 80% of our revenue it is very important that nothing goes "wrong".
Our application is running on a LAMP stack.
What are the best practices for testing a major redesign?
Some issues i am thinking of:
When a/b testing a whole design (if possible) i guess you definitaly
dont want Google to come by and index youre new design (since its
still in test phase). How to handle this?
Should you redirect a percentage of the users to a new url (or
perhaps subdomain)? Or is it better to serve the new content from the
existing indexed urls based on session?
How to compare statistics from a Google Analytics point of view?
How to hint Google about a new design? Should i e.g.
create a new UA code?
Solution might be to set a cookie only for customers who enter the website via the homepage. Doing so, you're excluding adwords traffic and returning visitors, who might be expecting an other webdesign, serve them the original website and leave their experience untouched.
Start the test with home traffic only, set cookie and redirect a percentage to a subdomain. Measure conversion rate by a dimension in Google analytics, within same analytics account. Set a 'disallow subdomain' in your robots.txt to exclude the subdomain from crawling by SE's.
Marc, You’re mixing a few different concerns here:
Instrumentation. If you changes can be expressed via HTML/CSS/JavaScript only, i.e. optimizational in nature, you may be able to instrument using tols like VWO or Optimizely. If there are server side changes too, then a tool like Sitespect (any server stack) or Variant (Java only) might be in order. The advantange of using a commecial product is that they provide a number of important features out of the box, e.g. collecting experiment data, experience stability (returning user sees the same experience), etc. You may be able to instrument on your own, but unless you’re looking at a handful of pages, that typically is hard, particularly if you want to do it outside of the app, via the DevOps mechanisms.
SEO. If you get your instrumentation right, this shouldn’t be an issue. Public URIs should not differ for the control and variant of the same resource.
Traffic routing. Another reason to consider a commercial tool. They factor that out of your app and let you set percentages. Some tools, like Variant, will allow you to write custom targeters, e.g. “value” users always see control.

How do you get the device name (or hostname) from a Chrome Extension?

Is there a way to retrieve the device name from a Chrome Extension?
Ideally I'd like to get the same String that is displayed in the 'Other devices' menu on the new tab page... Is that piece of information available to extensions?
Alternatively, is the hostname available?
What I managed to get is the user-agent by accessing window.navigator.userAgent, but that's it...
No. A persistent and unique identifier associated with the user's hardware would basically be an undeletable cookie. For privacy reasons, browsers (and browser-extension APIs) don't provide such identifiers.
Edit: from experimental.systemInfo.* you might be able to construct something that will describe certain attributes about the user's system. It won't be distinctive enough to guarantee uniqueness in a dropdown menu, for example, but it might be a step in the right direction. Note that these APIs are experimental so you won't be able to distribute extensions using them through the web store.
Yes. Since Chrome version 43, released a while after the question and other answer here, you can get a unique device ID in a Chrome extension with chrome.instanceID.getID().
The device names in the Other Devices menu (chrome://history/syncedTabs) can be found with chrome.sessions.getDevices() but it only includes all your other devices, not the current one!

How to take screenshot of rendered HTML page

Our web analytics package includes detailed information about user's activity within a page, and we show (click/scroll/interaction) visualizations in an overlay atop the web page. Currently this is an IFrame containing a live rendering of the page.
Since pages change over time, older data no longer corresponds to the current layout of the page. We would like to run a spider to occasionally take snapshots of the pages, allowing us to maintain a record of interactions with various versions of the page.
We have a working implementation of this (Linux), but the snapshot process is a hideous Python/JavaScript/HTML hack which opens a Firefox window, screenshotting and scrolling and merging and saving to a file. This requires us to install the X stack on our normally headless servers, and takes over a minute per page.
We would prefer a headless implementation with performance closer to that of the rendering time in a regular web browser, but haven't found anything.
There's some movement towards building something using Mozilla source as a starting point, but that seems like overkill to me, as well as a maintenance nightmare if we try to keep it up to date.
Suggestions?
An article on Digital Inspiration points towards CutyCapt which is cross-platform and uses the Webkit rendering engine as well as IECapt which uses the present IE rendering engine and requires Windows, natch. Nothing off the top of my head which uses Gecko, Firefox's rendering engine.
I doubt you're going to be able to get away from X, however. Since CutyCapt requires Qt, it requires either X or a Windows installation. And, similarly, IECapt will require Windows (or Wine if you want to try to run it under Linux, and then you're back to needing X). I doubt you'll be able to find a rendering engine which doesn't require Qt, Gtk, GDI, or Cocoa, and therefore requires a full install of display libraries.
Why not store the HTML that is sent out to the client? You could then use that to redisplay in a webbrowser as a page to show what it looked like.
Using your webanalytics data about use actions, you could they use that to default the combo boxes, fields etc to the values the client would have had, even change the CSS on buttons, etc, to mark them as being pushed.
As a benefit, you don't need the X stack, don't need to do any crawling or storing of images.
EDIT (Re Andrew Moore):
This is were you store the current CSS/images under a version number. Place an easily parsable version number in a comment in the HTML. If you change your CSS/images and use the existing names, increment the version number in the HTML output sent out.
The system that stores the HTML will know that it needs to grab a new copy and store under a new number. When redisplaying, it simply uses the version number to determine which CSS/image set to use.
We currently have a system here that uses a very similiar system so we can track users actions and provide better support when they call our help desk, as they can bring up the users session and follow what they did, even some-what live.
you can even code it to auto-censor sensitive fields when it is stored.
depending on the specifics of your needs perhaps you could get away with using one of the many free webpage thumbnail services? snapcasa, for example lets you generate thousands per month / no charge no advertizing .. (not ever used, just googled 'free thumbnail service') to find this.
just a thot