I want to develop an app (for Chrome desktop) that will retrieve data from different webpages the user surf to and aggregate it, or inject some added JavaScript functionality to those pages, later on showing the user statistics about the webpages he surf to. Like how many pages the user have been having more that 3 images in them.
Now, I know Chrome Extensions can Inject JavaScript code and therefor also retrieve data, but I want my App to be a Chrome App. Can it also pull data from WebPages and / or Inject JS to those pages ?
Thanks.
A Chrome App is, by design, isolated from the browser. You can't enumerate tabs, inject content scripts, etc. at all, as you can see from an entirely different list of available APIs.
While you could embed a pseudo-browser in your app using the <webview> tag, it's going to be hard to convince the user to use your limited browser over "real" Chrome.
If you want to interact with a browser, you need an extension. If you also really need Chrome App capabilities you'll need both separately, and they can talk to each other.
Related
I have a webapp that let users place dots on sitemap and link them to images.
The web app uses Javascript, CSS, and HTML.
phase1
While the user is subscribed he uses a rich set of functionalities to:
add dots on the sitemap and link them to images
edit the dots: move, delete, link momultiple images etc ..
etc..
This is done via the website that hosts the webapp.
phase2
When the user ends the subscription, he gets a .zip file with the information that he created (sitemap, images, links between the sitemap and the images, etc..).
The user can then connect to the website that hosts the webapp, without signing in and get a subset of the functionalities (e.g. he can only click on the dots and see the linked images, but he can no longer edit the dots or add images).
I want to change phase2.
Instead of interacting with the webapp on the website, I want to "freeze" the webapp into a interactive-pdf, or h5p page that can be played independently without the webapp.
There are multiple reasons that motivate to do this:
the webapp is complex, so engaging with the webapp is prone to more errors.
If the small subset functionality of the final data, which boils down to showing the image when clicking on the hyperlink, can be done via h5p browsing, then the risks for runtime errors are greatly reduced.
the interactive-pdf or .h5p file can be browsed by variety of tools potentially even when being offline.
the end product can be re-designed to appear more simple.
My questions:
is it possible to programatically convert the Javascript, CSS, and HTML content into a interactive-pdf or .h5p page?
Every end-product will be different (e.g. by the number of dots, and their location in the sitemap) so having to manually create the .h5p page every time is not practical.
are there mobile apps (e.g. on Apple Store, or Google Play) that can read .h5p content locally, e.g. when the device is offline?
Thanks
EDIT:
Oliver Tacke, thank you for replying.
Up to few days ago, looking for a solution to my problem, I did not hear about h5p at all.
When looking into h5p, I see that
many comments rlated to h5p that is a bit old - from ~5/6 years ago.
h5p is frequently talked in context of education (e.g. Moodle)
when I filed the question I could not even find a tag for 'h5p'
I could not find forums for h5p in mainstream channels like Discourse or Slack
So I want to know if I'm in the right direction at all.
Is h5p a new thing that just takes time to pick up, or is it something that started a while ago and dwindlled down,
or maybe I'm wrong and it is currently more active than I think (I'm aware of h5p.org and I do see activity there).
Basically, I want to create interactive content that can work
ideally offline, or
online but with a mainstream browser/tool/website (i.e. without needing my special website)
In the design industry, I know there are interactive catalogues.
But I don't know if the user can download them and somehow (e.g. with an epub reader) read them.
Thanks
I don't know anything about creating PDFs programmatically, so I can only offer a partial answer for the H5P related part. Given the broad scope of your question, this may be acceptable as a comment.
H5P content follows a specification that is documented at https://h5p.org/documentation/developers/h5p-specification.
You would basically have to implement an H5P content type library (file) from the files that you are given by the service. I assume that the JavaScript and CSS files are always the same, then those could be reused directly (but potentially not legally). You would also have to add some more JavaScript that takes parameters and generates the HTML output that you get from the service. You would then have to model semantics.json to suit the parameters, and then you essentially have an H5P content type. You don't have to use the then available form based editor (which probably wouldn't make sense), but you could create the content.json file programmatically and put it into the H5P content file archive. To create that file programmatically, you'd have to create a converter that identities the parameters in the HTML file generated by that service and transform them into the H5P semantics/content format. Not sure if it made more sense to rather create an editor widget for H5P, so you wouldn't have to depend on the other service at all.
There are currently no known mobile apps that allow you to load and run H5P content. They are on the roadmap of the H5P core team, but I wouldn't expect them to work on those any time soon. There's the moodle app for the moodle LMS that allows to use H5P content offline, but it needs to be fetched from a moodle instance. There's Lumi that allows to run H5P content locally on Windows, MacOS and Linux, but not on Android or iOS. However, Lumi also allows to create single standalone HTML files from H5P content containing all the content and logic ready to play, so that would allow offline use on Android and iOS.
I am trying to learn what could be the best ways of developing user interface for chrome extension for my application. The 2 approaches that I have come across are i)Using a browser action with default_popup html page or ii) Injecting some component into the page that is loaded in the tab. First approach is pretty straightforward but has some restricted use (like it is destroyed on tab/window switch which is useful in the context of my application). Coming to the second approach, it seems it requires every component which can be injected to be listed under web_accessible_resources. As the extension UI gets complex, this list is bound to increase. But surprisingly, Pocket extension's manifest does not seem to list any js files or html files though it does not use a popup page too. How does it work? Is there any other way of creating the user interface too?
Have you checked on the documentation regarding chrome.windows API? This API will allow you to create new windows and tabs in the browser, so you can create the html content from your extension. All you'll need is declaring the pertinent permissions on the manifest file. You can read more information here: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/windows
I want to modify chrome start page, change background and maybe logo.
I want to include jQuery in users local storage and load it while users page loads ( search page )
I never done anything with chrome so I want some way where to start. Do I go reading with apps or extensions?
As a rule of thumb: Choose an app if you want to develop an (independent) application that can stand on its own. If you want to interact with the browser (e.g. modify a web page), build an extension.
In your case, you definitely need an extension.
Change start page - use chrome_url_overrides in the manifest file to override newtab.
Locally store jQuery: Although it's possible to store jQuery in local storage, you're probably fine with packaging jQuery with your extension.
To add it to your user's "search page", you have to use a content script. By default, content scripts run in an execution environment that is different from the page (the document's DOM is shared though). Usually, this behavior is desired. If you really want to expose the jQuery library to the scripts in the page, take a look at this answer.
If you really want to load some script from a remote location and use it as a content script, read Chrome extension adding external javascript to current page's html.
I'm not sure what you mean by "change background and maybe logo". If you're referring to the browser's appearance, the only option to do that is by creating a theme. This must be a separate extension.
We're going to create a data-driven mobile HTML5 app. I was thinking we can just access it using the default browser on each platform. I read about caching behavior of browsers on latest versions of iOS and Android, but wasn't able to find any information about the possibility of telling the browser, by using some sort of headers or whatever, to store a particular resource, HTML or JS or CSS or an image, indefinitely in cache until a certain date, for ex. Is that even possible?
The idea here is users open the application regularly but not often. Their browsing will fill the cache with other data; we need to "pin" or "anchor" our app to stay there despite cache being filled, like "higher priority".
Any other suggestions would be welcome (ie., creating a "shell" native app, etc.)
These links answered the question:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_app_cache.asp
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/#toc-updating-cache
I'm curious to know your ideas on the best methodology to build offline-capable mobile web apps on to provide the best UX to the end user.
The end product should use localstorage and appcache but be completely transparent to the user (i.e. for cache manifest, if a user navigates away from the page before everything is downloaded, the caching is restarted).
Is the only method to provide this functionality to build it for example on Backbone.js and have a single page app where the downloads can happen asynchronously in the background?
What other frameworks / technologies have you come across?
Let's see, offline web-apps? The two big things that I think do the trick are:
Local storage Embedded images w/Data URI's
(http://css-tricks.com/5970-data-uris/) Embedding
Javascript/stylesheets in the page (no external files that are
required for the site)
Together, those make a pretty solid offline app which is able to function without an internet connection.