how to place mobile call from PWA - progressive-web-apps

In the PWA, I would like to give a feature where it will show user's mobile number and after tapping on call button within PWA, actual mobile call should get triggered.
I couldn't find any reference or documentation for this. Please let me know how to achieve this action ?

If you want to link a phone number, it's really similar to linking a regular website:
+1 (555) 555-1234
This works for websites in general, there is nothing special about it being in a PWA.
If you want even more information about telephone links, this article is pretty good: https://css-tricks.com/the-current-state-of-telephone-links/
It's from 2016 so browser support is even better. There's a bunch of info in there about SEO and country codes as well.

Related

Do Facebook Like Buttons require an App ID?

When going to the set up pages for all the Social Plugins, they now provide example code using an APP ID.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
Is an APP ID now required for the Like Button and other plugins? What happens if an APP ID is not included when using the plugins?
I've checked the Facebook developer blog and read about the Like Button Migration. I haven't been able to find a straight answer for this either there or in the FB Like Reference.
Notice:
This is an old dated information, the official facebook's behaviors are changed.
Simply, the answer is No, just look at the following official Facebook resource.
Notice: To do it without need to the app id, you have to visit the above page when you are signed out from Facebook. Look at the following screen shot.
As semsem said, the simple answer is "no it is not required"... there are ways to get around having an appId associated with the "like" button. Here's my experience working with this. I'm not a Facebook or Open Graph expert, so YMMV.
Why we avoided using the appId on the button:
We're providing an service where we have one website (the engine, as it were) that provides a service distributing online courses to students (customers). Instructors (also customers) who what to use our service to disseminate courses to students can brand the site how they wish, and map their domain to their section of our website that serves those course(s).
As a simplified example: we serve from http://courses.example.com/instructor_name, but we want students to access the content through http://www.instructors-domain.com/. Any courses would be sub-directories off the base URL.
Associating the "like" button with our Facebook App disallows any cross domain shenanigans. While there are valid reasons for doing so, it doesn't work for where we're at in our company and product evolution. So we needed to find a workaround.
We wanted to allow folks to "like" a course, have the "story" point to the appropriate places on the net, as well as get some customization (e.g. "NAME likes an online course on FBAppName"). We basically achieved this. We lost some functionality which we deemed acceptable at this point in our evolution.
The short of it
I used the iframe version of the Facebook "like" button as dictated by the appropriate Facebook developer's page (for the link see semesm's answer for the link, I got no rep). I took their code snippet and manually removed the appId query string in the iframe's src.
In the "liked" page itself (which was the same page that had the "like" button) I used the Open Graph meta tags including specifying the appId. (These tags were specified: fb:app_id, og:type, og:url, og:site_name, og:title, og:description, og:image.)
The og:type was our custom type of the form 'namespace:app_custom_object_name'.
A failed approach
My first attempt was to use what I understand as the preferred method, the "HTML5" tab in the "Get Code" section of the developer's "like-button" page. I tried their method stripping the appId from the appropriate places. This method proved ineffectual.
If the domain doesn't match that in the Facebook App, there will be no "like" button.
If the domain does match, the "like" button will appear. However, it takes 3 clicks to actually "like" something. The first click changes the "thumbs-up Like" icon to a normal anchor with one word that didn't make obvious sense (I forgot what the word was). The second click will brings up the login/authorization window for using our app. The third actually bring up the modern fancy "like" box where you can type in a comment. I didn't find a way around this behavior.
Note that when I specified the appId in this approach on the appropriate domain, it worked as one would expect (though inconsistent with our desired behavior).
I did not try the other two options in the "Get Code" section of the "like-button" page.
Informed speculation and rumor
In my research around this, my overall impression is that requiring an appId is the way of the future for Facebook. Who knows if the old way will be depreciated, probably never, though I didn't find anything in the docs talking about this "legacy" behavior. This makes sense to me with their newer offerings and the advanced tracking that becomes available with this method.
I've seen suggestions that the "likes" used in this manner are akin to second-class citizens... treated as inferior in some respects. In my own experimentation I found the behavior of the fully specified appId (in the "like" button itself) to be different and more accessible and predictable (in terms of Open Graph queries and visibility on my limited Facebook tests) than the partially specified appId. (Again, I've found no solid documentation on this, and did not endeavor to full grok the differences.)
May this info help someone else along. Good luck!
So, I just tried the sємsєм method, as comments say: Facebook want you to login to get the code, and if you have an app, you have to choose one.
But if you don't, it gives you a code without any app reference.
So when you get a code – no matter any app you choose –, you just need to remove the appId parameter in the .js URL (&appId=##############), and you got (for the latest HTML5 code, 6th line):
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";
The code for the div element does not change.
I simply use the URL code inside an iframe tag without an appID and it seams to work,
here is an example:
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<%=request.original_url%>&width&layout=button_count&action=like&show_faces=false&share=false&height=35&appId=" frameBorder="0" width="150" height="25">
</iframe>
According to Facebook's Social Plugins FAQ
Web: If you are using Social Plugins on the web, you do not need to create a Facebook app for integrating a Social Plugin.
iOS/Android: If you are using Social Plugins within a iOS or Android app, you need to create a Facebook app and tie it to your app identifier.
It seems that the official answer is that they are only required for iOS/Android.

Links to access phone features from browser

I know that I have seen something like this in somewhere...But no remember where.
Does somebody know what are the features of a smartphone(iphone, android, blackberry) that I can access from a Web Browser?
In some place I had see a list of links that can access different features of the phones(too many).
I mean, I know some things like:
Link Text
Link Text
Link Text
but, is it there something like:
Link Text ???? OR
Link Text ????
Thank for your answers!!
For iOS, it all works via a system called URL Schemes. Checkout this website which even builds the right link for you in HTML.

Add email page link button to a webpage

I'm adding social media buttons to my website. Facebook like, Twitter tweet etc buttons were very easy.
However I also need an email the page (or rather a link to the page) button. I have trawled the internet but cannot find a simple and good implementation.
Ideally I'd like to be able to copy some reliable code, and have the button look in the same style as the ones on this page: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6920023/testbuttons.html
If anyone has done this before I would be very glad to hear from you :)
Thanks in advance.
Why not just use the AddThis service? You simply register, provide them with your website url and then select the social media / link mechanisms you would like to use on your site. At the end they provide you with a block of HTML code to drop into your site and low and behold, the buttons and appearance you selected will be present. You can also select mechanism such as pain old email when setting it up.
An example of it in place;
Here's the link: http://www.addthis.com/
As far as i know, you will have to use Mailto: apart from doing some deep Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail API integration. That's about as good as your going to get.
You can dynamically fill out subject, body, cc fields etc using javascript/php (or whatever you are using)

Link directly to Google Maps transit directions mobile site

If you visit maps.google.com on a mobile device, then press 'Menu', 'Get Directions', and select the 'transit' option, you are taken to a page where you can enter two locations and a date/time, and get directions on public transit. However, the URL is still maps.google.com.
Is there any way to link directly to this page so that I can load it in a UIWebView in my iOS app? Would 'clicking' the buttons in Javascript be (the only/a good) solution?
Try: http://www.google.com/transit
Even clicking the buttons in javascript doesn't seem to be working. The Google Maps code is a little strange- the event listeners aren't assigned directly and I can't get a .click() to work. So what I'll do is have the user enter the two locations in boxes in the app, then load something like http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Coover+Hall&daddr=lied+rec+center in the UIWebView, except I'll add some more specific location information before building the URL, since this is a city-specific app. Not a perfect solution but it gets the job done.
You could create a URL that links to the transit directions with the "dirflg=r" paramater.
Find the other URL parameters here: http://web.archive.org/web/20110714031648/http://mapki.com/wiki/Google_Map_Parameters

embed iphone contact on page click link

my question is analogous to the "mailto:email#email.com" type of link but is more specifically:
if a phone number exists on a page and is viewed by a user on an iphone (phone number will appear as link), is there a way for that link to automatically (upon user clicking) ask the user if they want to add that number to the contact, and then auto fill certain details?
this seems a bit too amorphous to be obviously possible, but you never know.
Nope. Phone numbers will be recognized by Mobile Safari automatically, and be "forced" to be seen as telephone numbers by doing something like this:
555-1212
But you can't control the phone's behavior when the user taps the link. (Cool feature idea though. :) )
It think it's not necessary to use a tel: as a href protocol prefix. I am not sure if something like this validates or is somehow standard. There is also a skype href hack: href="skype:asdasdasd".
Alternative Solution
iOs also detects telephone numbers in text automagically. They just need the right format. See also here for formats: http://hjacob.com/blog/2009/07/making-a-phone-number-clickable-for-iphone-users/