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.
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.
thanks in advance for your time to help me.
So... I work on a Retail store and we use a kiosk-like app on the laptops with the hardware and price information.
Recently i realized (because it runs 24/7) the lcds are getting burned by the kiosk app and its a major problem to the store.
Since i cannot make changes on the app itself i realized the best option was to create some kind of solution to this problem.
So i thought on creating an offline / local website in HTML that mimics the layout on the kiosk app and use some kind of anti-lcdburn jquery running along. (already have the code for the anti burn jquery).
My main problem is the kiosk app was really user-friendly on the configuration. Anyone on my store could easily change the data showing.
But in the other hand if i want to implement a static html website, anyone without html skills can't easily change the values.
My first thought was to create some kind of config file and find a way to import it. My main issue it i need to make this so that anyone with low-it skills can enter a page , change values and those values would show up on the kiosk page.
Something like a simple CMS but for a local file.
Any ideas?
Best regards
Can you display the website inside an iframe?
If so, just make a file that loads the website in an iframe, with the anti screen-burn jQuery over the top.
Anything more than that would be overkill and rebuilding something that appears to already exist - have you considered asking the creator of the app to include an anti screen-burn option?
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.
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
A client of mine has a full-Flash site and an HTML site (wordpress). Currently, the HTML site lives at http://www.domain.com, while the Flash site lives at http://www.domain.com/flash (swfobject detection at http://www.domain.com redirects flash users to the flash URL). The client isn't entirely pleased with this arrangement in terms of SEO, as links to their site sometimes point to http://www.domain.com and sometimes to http://www.domain.com/flash.
In a few weeks, the client will be rolling out a new version of their Flash site, which features deeplinking, among other things. Instead of living in its own folder off of the domain, the full-Flash site will be a "progressively enhanced" version of the HTML site, so if a user supports Flash, all HTML content will be replaced by Flash content.
Once the new site is launched, each page/URL in the Flash site will have a corresponding HTML page/URL; for example, the Flash content at http://www.domain.com/#/about/clients corresponds to the HTML content at http://www.domain.com/about/clients.
We're going to implement a 301 redirect so the old /flash path points to the domain itself, but we're not sure how to proceed in terms of redirects between the HTML and Flash versions of the site. One possibility would be to simply do client-side detection of capabilities and redirect the user to the appropriate version; under that scenario, a non-Flash-capable client that attempts to visit http://www.domain.com/#/about/clients would be JS-redirected to http://www.domain.com/about/clients, and a Flash-capable client visiting http://www.domain.com/about/clients would be JS-redirected to http://www.domain.com/#/about/clients.
Is this a reasonable approach? Are there any potential SEO red flags that we should be aware of before proceeding?
Thanks for your consideration!
The redirect from /#/about/clients to /about/clients sounds reasonable, but applying the reverse could cause problems - if your Flash detection doesn't work correctly (perhaps Flash is blocked etc.) then you may send the user into an infinite redirect loop.
Personally, I would recommend that non-hash links always load their content as expected, in a static manner. If the user then navigates, you may either end up with a URL like /about/clients#/ (if they went to the home page) (this shouldn't be an issue as crawlers will never end up visiting them this way) or you can have them redirect to / next time they navigate.
IMHO, I'd say that a pure JavaScript solution to the hash problem would be easier to manage as there are already many good examples of this.
Also consider using #! instead of # - this 'hash-bang' technique is being pushed by Google as a way of identifying to search engines that your hash is important and that its contents differ from what you would see without the hash part. Google can already point to specific parts of a page using # and if you follow the hash-bang technique on the client and server-side, it will be able to index your AJAX/Flash links just like regular links (see the implementation details and the requirements you need to fulfill).