TLDR: Can the Chrome Bluetooth API be used on the Windows mobile platform?
I'm on a quest to find a solution for bluetooth connectivity across various platforms.
We plan on having native iOS and Android versions for our app, and a web app for other platforms (limited time and budget).
The setup of our product requires a one-time bluetooth connection to configure a wireless connection if necessary. This is fine for the iOS and Android versions of the app, but presents a problem for desktops/laptops or Windows mobile users.
The option for our device to act as an accesspoint has been considered, but it's not a very user-friendly solution. It needs to be easy enough your grandmother can set it up, and switching to another wireless network doesn't qualify.
In my research, I've come across the Chrome Bluetooth API available in Chrome Browsers starting in version 37. I'm wondering how accessible this would be for, say, the Windows mobile crowd. Or laptop and desktops running Windows, ChromeOS, etc.
Thanks in advance!
First, that api is not available to the web, it is available for Chrome Packaged Apps, which are published to and installed from the Chrome Web Store (they do not have a URL you can just visit).
Second, I do not think that Chrome Apps are available for windows mobile, though they are supported for all the desktop platforms. (Make sure that the bluetooth api support you need is fully support across all platforms, though, since there are some limitations).
Finally, there is ongoing work for an upcoming web-bluetooth api which will be available for the open web -- but that is some ways away.
Best of luck.
Related
Our company has installed TV Kiosk around our locations for our employee communication. We are using HDMI Intel Compute sticks with Windows 10 with a chrome browser to view various URL websites.
We have an extension app Rotisserie 1 which scrolls through various URL websites. To start the application you have to click on the extension in the bar. We need to develop a script to launch chrome and start running a chrome extension with out any human interaction.
Our company is posting this a job/gig and is willing to take bids.
There is a –kiosk flag you can use:
https://www.sitepoint.com/google-chrome-kiosk-mode/
If you specify Chromebit as the hardware option this would be easy. It's like a compute stick but it runs Chrome OS.
This support article is for Chromebook but the concept is the same. You can manage all your kiosks without having to be in the building!
https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/3134673?hl=en
Some websites claim to 'not support Linux', but appear to work fine when I browse them from a Linux box. One such site refuses to allow me to log in when my User Agent String advertises that I'm running Linux, but works perfectly fine when I use the User Agent Switcher add-on in Firefox.
What features of a website could be OS specific?
If a website is designed to work on a particular browser, should it work on that browser regardless of the underlying OS?
This SO question suggests that rendering may be platform dependent. Is it likely that rendering differences would be significant enough to make a website unusable under a certain OS?
Are there more fundamental ways in which it could be OS dependent?
The website should look fine under same browser version in various OSs. There are things like location services that can be disabled on your OS completely, or java and flash applets but mostly they are cross-platform.
Howerver, a shining example is Silverlight that is not supported on Linux so pages relying on it (e.g. Netflix) will not work on Linux.
Mostly its just laziness of staff to test website on linux and thus they simply state that its not supported to avoid complaints from users.
I have been programming for windows since about v2.1 and am interested in some apps for the phone now that it seems to be coming of age.
Search as I might, I cannot find a developer's unlocked version of a phone other than CDMA one and I can't use that as there is only AT&T and TMo available out here in the boonies.
Buying a dev's version for Android was simple as going to Moto's site and dropping one in the shopping cart.
If msoft are wondering why there are so few win-phone devs and/or, they might start looking at how hard or easy it is to get started. I have installed the SDK and the emulator is OK, but not something I would trust enough without testing it on my own phone.
Any helpful thoughts and suggestion on where to get a phone that it is not against the warranty to unlock?
You can use any windows phone as long as it supports the OS version (windows phone 8/8.1 is not supported in the older models) you're coding for. You don't need a developer version of a phone.
You need a developer's account though (should be 20/year now) and take a look at this page for registering your device. For older devices you need Zune software but it's not needed for windows phone 8 and up.
And if you want to use a real device for testing, without wanting to buy a device, you could use the Remote Device Access service
With it you can use a real device (located in Tampere/Finland) over the internet with your browser. Limitations include the lack of physically touching/rotating the device, and that calls/SMS are disabled both incoming & outgoing ones.
We have used HTML5s navigator.geolocation and found it to be very good on iOS and Android smartphones. Now the users want the same HTML5 web app to run on a laptop with external GPS. Using Windows 7 on the laptop I just can't figure a way to share the location to a HTML5 browser (tried Safari, FF, IE, Chrome). For testing I am using a GlobalStat BU-353 USB GPS which works standalone and I have found GPSDirect (cool freeware) to feed that signal to Win7 Sensor Location Services but still the HTML5 browsers do not see the GPS.
Anyone had any luck with this please ?
I was looking for similar solution and found this: GpsGate.
It is standalone application which connects to almost any GPS device and publishes it's data in several forms including browsers (through Javascript API which in turn makes jsonp call to http://localhost:12175/gps/[getVersion|getGpsInfo]?jsonp=padding). It's not compatible with Geolocation API, but I think writing simple adapter shouldn't take much time. Another good thing is that it's Express edition is free for both private and commercial use (link).
EDIT: After some digging I found this patch which adds geolocation compatible adapter for GpsGate to some other geolocation library.
Issue 45535 is beginning to address this in the Chromium feature requests. As of Jan 5 2012, the feature has been marked as "started".
Feature request: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=45535
As long as you only need a single browser for your client solution (and not a universal solution) this will solve your problem.
A great method to start testing and keeping an eye out for this issue is to download Chrome Canary, which is usually 2 versions ahead of the Chrome release. I'm right now using v18 on Canary and it's great since I've been keeping an eye on the websocket schema changes.
You can find Canary here: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/chromesxs
I'm using gears.js and geo.js in an attempt to cover all grounds, in terms of finding the user's geolocation. So if the user is using something less than IE9, I would possibly prompt install for Google Gears, so I know for desktop, IE7 + is covered.
For the mobile devices I'm looking at geo
which covers quite a few mobile devices.
I'm wondering if there is anything which accounts for WP7 geolocation as well using JavaScript, and if there is better ways of handling GeoLocation for all devices.
Not entirely sure how Google Gears work for IE7/8 also, so any elaboration on that would be great. (I'm not assuming Gears is the only/best way forward though for non geolocation supported browsers, so any correction on that is fine!)
I ran into this today: http://geosenseforwindows.com/ it basically gives Wifi based geolocation to the Windows 7 Sensor API:
Geosense is a Windows Sensor that
provides the Location and Sensors
platform in Windows 7 with accurate
and reasonably ubiquitous positioning
information without requiring or the
assistance of GPS hardware, enabling
more practical location-based
applications and scenarios on Windows
7.
Unfortunately I don't think IE can access that Sensor API without resorting to COM calls in your javascript.
We also use the free/commercial GpsGate, which lets any browser on a Windows machine directly access a real hardware GPS device on the computer.
In answer to the WP7 part of your question.
There is CURRENTLY no way to get geolocation from in the browser in IE on Windows Phone 7. This should change when the next version of the browser is released.