I need to develop a catalogue mobile app, that will be used as products' brochure by the sales employees of the company. I need that the whole catalog of products (the list of products, the single product page, the product search) is accessible also when the device is offline.
I'm sure that this could be easly done developing the app as a native app. But I strongly would prefer to develop it in HTML5 as a web app. But I'm not sure that the HTML5 web app supports the offline access.
Searching on Google I found that if the cache is less than 5MB a web app works well as a native app. But in my scenario the catalogue of products is composed by 120 products, eachone with gallery of photos. So it is much more bigger than 5MB.
In your opinion, how can I deal with the offline access requirement? Maybe an hybrid solution, composed by half a web app and half a native app? Feel free to suggest your approach. Thanks
Why don't you try an existing hybrid mobile app framework, like: PhoneGap. You can build the app using html, CSS, and JavaScript.
http://www.sitepoint.com/top-7-hybrid-mobile-app-frameworks/
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I am creating an web application for user to manage their schedule. It will be MVC3/4 application. I want to know what will be the best approach to make it as mobile compatible also.
I read few articles online like using a phone gap,Kendo UI or a HTML 5 responsive view etc.Well i would love to try it all but dont ahve enough time to try it all.So what will be the best approach to handle this problem. Website will basic login,registration,Grids for data information and maybe a google calender intrigation for scheduling. User will be using this website on their desktop and also on their mobile devices.
Thanks in advance,
Arpan
I will definitely go with ASP.NET MVC 4 and jQuery Mobile
Since you are already building a web application, ASP.NET MVC 4 and jQuery Mobile will allow you to reuse your current model and controllers, and just build the presentation layer for mobile, you don't even have to take care of deciding which view to show to each device, MVC 4 will select the correct view when accessed from a mobile browser.
Note that this proposal implicitly chooses HTML5.
Kendo UI is a tool that will save time for complex controls like the schedule you plan to build, but it is not a different technology and you can add these controls later when you really need them.
Once your application is mature enough, then you can build a Native App to have better interoperation with the smartphone's own schedule, contacts and other features. When that moment arrives check out Xamarin that will allow you to build for any mobile platform using your existing C# knowledge. But do that later, start with the browser based version until the app mature.
I am going to create Web portal, which I would like to be some kind of illustrated guide of city. In brief, It would be a union of Web mapping application and image gallery application. User should be able to navigate on the map to find some interesting locations, then user may view images and read articles about these locations.
This application has two important requirements:
Has to be RIA / Single Page Application
Must support CMS approach, with separated Front-End and Back-Office sections.
I contemplate which technology and framework offers the easiest and most powerful tools to fulfill these requirements with the least of effort. Currently I am thinking about ASP.NET MVC and Google Web Toolkit. What is your opinion? What about other platforms? Or maybe there are existing systems, galleries or CMS platforms which suit to my demands?
Do you know any existing websites with similar architecture and functionalities?
I was thinking of writing a simple android app that would just contain my notes I've made for my job for my own personal reference. I figuered perhaps some of my co-workers would want to use this app too, but most of them use IPhones. I don't own any Apple products and I know nothing about developing for iOS. After some research I've decided perhaps the best approach is to develope the 'app' as a website instead, to be viewed offline. Does this approach make sense, and could I distribute such a product on an Apple device without any issues?
I'd recommend developing an offline application with PhoneGap. PhoneGap allows you to build your app once with web--standards, wrap it with PhoneGap, and then deploy it to multiple mobile platforms.
I am contemplating buying an iPad and am wondering what options I will have for developing an app for personal use ... specifically whether I will be able to do it as an offline browser app. The app currently exists as an Android Java app; it interacts with a large local database (about 3MB) and displays images and text drawn from a very large pool of resources stored locally (about 2GB).
My immediate questions are:
How would I get the files (html/javascript, database, images and text) transferred into the iPad's storage from a Windows PC? With Android this is a simple matter of hooking up via USB and using Windows Explorer. Googling suggests that for an iPad I might have to use an app on Windows called DiskAid, but this costs $25 which seems a bit steep for my simple purpose. Are there free alternatives?
Once the files are installed on the iPad how would I run the html app? On Android this appears to be a matter of keying "file:///sdcard/MyBrowserAppFolder/mybrowserapp.htm" into the browser's address box. Does th iPad browser work in a similar way.
There are two basic kinds of applications that run on iOS.
Mobile designed web applications that are hosted on a server and accessed through Safari or another browser.
Native applications built using Xcode and usually objective-c.
For the latter, you could use the phonegap framework to build an app using existing html and javascript.
My personal advice is to invest the time to learning how to code this up using objective-c. Depending on what format your db is in, importing the structure and data might be trivial. It will take an investment of time, but doing things using the native tools is the best choice for iOS development in my opinion. I was in the same situation (PHP, VB.NET and Javascript developer) and just decided to take the time and learn to do it right. This was a great decision and the development time of a simple to moderate application takes very little time now.
Safari on iOS does not support the URL's of type file:// natively. So you either write your own app, purchase an app or use something like a local web server after jailbreaking.
Alternatively, and if you can verify that the app you have mentioned does what you want to do, then maybe $25 is not so much of a price. Depends on what your time is worth :)
However there are cheaper apps around that allow to transfer and read html via wifi and usb. (Not sure I can name them here)
The USB transfer aka iTunes Filesharing is a standard function that a developer can enable in the info.plist of their app. Many apps use this to transfer data between Computer and iDevice.
I have a new project starting up that consists of building a webapp for a workorder based system. The main views are:
Viewing all open/closed/hold work-orders,
View Detail of Workorders
Create new Work orders
Account management.
In addition to being a webapp, it should also function as a mobile app.
What is the best approach for doing this? Will i have to develop a separate app for the mobile side? Can i use my webapp + sencha, jquery mobile, something.. that can work with my logic, classes, HTML structure to have it effectively work on mobile?
Or do i develop a mobile version first and think about progressive enhancement to the webapp (website)?
This question is open to all interpretations of flow, process, technologies.
Thank you Stack Overflowers.
Seperate out your business logic and model code from the view layer. Then use sencha touch and Extjs to create both a web and mobile (mobile web atleast) application. You can then reuse the model and business logic code and use the different frameworks to manage the view. When you have a mobile app running, use phone gap to turn it into a full-fledged app (assumming you need access to phone only systems (camera etc)).
We've done this with our own custom framework built on top of Ext and Sencha. We use ActiveRecord to run the models and then have a compile script that knows which files are for mobile and which are for web. We can then have all the code in the one repository and use the compiler to produce versions for the correct type (mobile or web).
It's definitely not a good idea to start with the mobile app, since web browsers are more ubiquitous than smart phones. Start with the web application and tailor the UI so that it can be easily displayed on smart phones as well as desktop browsers. If that's not a viable route, you could have a regular version and a mobile version of your website. In general, I think the overhead of writing a dedicated mobile client to browse your website is greater than the payoff unless you want to take advantage of the phones' hardware features like GPS or sensors (and even GPS you can still access from a web app using W3C geolocation api).