Google announced that they drop support for web apps in Chrome.
Basically, web app is a local HTML/CSS/JS app that runs in a separated custom "standalone" Chrome window.
Is there any way (preferably easy), to convert this web app to a real desktop app that not depend on Chrome in anyway? Using maybe NodeJS? If yes what is the right way to do it?
Thanks.
You could try one of these tools:
https://applicationize.me/
https://www.bzgapps.com/coherence
https://fluidapp.com/ (for Mac only)
Don't know about "easy", but it seems to me that the natural evolution is to Electron or NW.js, and both of these are mentioned in the Google blog article on this subject. (I'm moving to Electron.) Both have advantages over Chrome Apps, mostly that they are true desktop applications. To cite one example, you can now manipulate the menu bar, something out-of-bounds for Chrome Apps.
Pure JavaScript code in your Chrome App, such as anything to access the internet, should move over directly. Same for much UI stuff, as you're still using a browser window for the UI. The app will, however, have to be restructured.
Added Note: Chrome Apps ran on 4 platforms: MacOS, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS. Electron and NW.js apps won't run on ChromeOS. So, the ability to write a four-platform completely binary-portable app is going away.
Related
I'm really keen to develop a web browser application for Android Wear devices. To make such application I need a WebView object, but the major problem is that Google has made the android.webkit API unavailable in that OS.
Since Android is open-source, is it technically possible to manually include the needed libraries, by coping them from the android source code on GitHub into my project? Are they going to work like as in a normal Android device, and is it legal?
Here is the link to the API I'd like to use.
Developing a browser based on WebView is not a good idea anyway. Although historically Android Browser was based on WebView, it had to use a lot of hidden APIs in order to work. All more or less functional browser apps based on WebView have to do the same, which makes them fragile. Also, the resulting browser app will not be as secure as a real multi-process web browser.
A better idea is to take Chromium and build it using Wear SDK. And there is already one built this way.
You don't have access to a complete source for Android Wear to build a complete image.
We will develop an app that we would like to distribute in through the following channels:
Android and iOS apps through Google Play and iTunes (the app will
use notifications extensively and presence in Google Play and App store is required)
Web app to run in web browsers on mobile devices
Web app to run in web browsers on laptop and desktop computers. We would like to support Chrome, Internet Explorer (starting from IE9),
Firefox and Safari browsers.
Our understanding is that Ionic is developed targeting primarily 1. and that the web apps in 2. and 3. above are not really what Ionic is intended for. We have looked around to try to understand if Ionic likely works for 2. and 3. and also made some quick tests ourselves.
From one of the links at the end: "Your webapp will run in desktop browsers yes, as it is made of html, css and javascript. The phonegap specific javascript calls (accelerometer, compass, file, etc) won't. Basically, if you stick to standard yes you will be able to port relatively easily your app to most browser, the job at this point being mostly a work of theming."
From another one: "I do know that FireFox is simply not supported. I don't know how well Ionic works in IE X."
To try it out we have built a limited version of our app in Ionic. From what we can see the app works for 1, 2 and 3. For example, it runs without issues on FireFox that is mentioned as not supported in the quote above. This means that to us it looks like the first quote saying that the web app will work in desktop browsers is correct.
I understand that this is a fairly generic question and might be hard to answer, but since we have found contradicting information when looking we are trying to understand more before making a decision.
Any feedback would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Markus
Is it a good idea to use ionic to build mobile web version of a website?
Can Ionic Framework run in desktop web browser like Chrome, Mozilla, IE9+?
http://forum.ionicframework.com/t/ionic-components-on-ie/1826
Phonegap web app in regular desktop browsers
http://ionicframework.com/docs/overview/#css-sass
Ionic is tested for mobile only. Internet Explorer for example is not tested and does not properly handle a number of features in Ionic. Desktop browsers act differently than mobile browsers.
Ionic is focused on building native/hybrid mobile apps rather than
mobile websites.
As such, our browser support tends to be whatever Web View API is
available to native apps on a given platform. For Ionic 1.1.0
"xenon-xerus", that means UIWebView for iOS 7+, and Android 4.1 and
up. Windows Phone and FirefoxOS support is on our roadmap.
If it's cheaper for you to test everything on all different desktop browsers than to develop a version for it sharing the same controllers and services --- go ahead but it won't come "out of the box".
Also, I recommend looking at Electron to build desktop apps from webapps.
ionic is targting mobile apps only , but you can develop your desktop app using node webkit and angular material for example and share some code between your apps
How do you make a web app start up instantly - is it possible to make as fast as a native app that is already loaded?
I have developed a HTML5 web app that runs nicely on Iphone 4 with a splashscreen. But now I'm looking into performance:
I use a manifest file to ensure that all files are loaded from the local storage. I have checked both in chrome and mobile safari, that the files are stored correctly locally. Now performance it quite different depending on how I access my web app:
~4s When I load the web app in browser (not from a home screen icon).
~6s When I load from an "add to homescreen" icon
When I load in chrome browser it takes 234ms to load and render the whole page. I seems like the lack of speed is due to the rendering being pretty slow.
Any performance suggestions are very welcome.
I know from experience that a MacOSX device the Chrome App all of its previous versions/updates leaves in its App. This maybe also apply to ios, since it's is a stripped version of the MacOSX sysem.
It might help to delete the Chrome App from your iPhone and re-install it from the App store.
This way you be sure you have a clean copy op Chrome on the iPhone whithout all the previous Chrome versions.
I hope this helps.
I am planning to make an iPhone web application and I just wanted to know what is required for web development?
Can I do the web development on a windows machine? Does Apple provide any iPhone plugin so that we can develop web application using Windows?
What is required for developing on a Mac?
Regards,
Amit
If you are making a web application, you can download Safari for Windows and view it there.
You can also use Joe Hewitt's iUI framework to make your app look and feel all iPhone-y.
? If you are gonna build a web application, the application runs on the browser. To use your application the user use Safari (on the iPhone). Apple doesn't control web applications.
If you mean, embed your web application, INSIDE a native iPhone application, you need a Mac to build the wrapper, for the core application you can use whatever system you want.
May I suggest to take a look at phonegap (if you are looking to iPhone app).
Check out these three apple sites:
http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/codinghowtos/Mobile/GraphicsMediaAndVisualEffects/index.html
http://developer.apple.com/safari/
http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/navigation/CodingHow-Tos.html
I would check out these pages thoroughly, and also at a minimum, I'd download safari for mac or windows.
Yes, you can develop it on windows. They are just web apps.
For mac or windows, latest safari and a public website is probably all you need. Check out google app engine for a good free development site that supports a database/datastore. www.appspot.com
Also, you can look at the webapps on a regular computer. http://www.apple.com/webapps/travel/staycation.html
http://wsidecar.apple.com/cgi-bin/nph-reg3rdpty2.pl/product=25536&cat=94&platform=osx&method=sa/
http://www.apple.com/webapps/games/
I presume you are talking about creating a web application designed to be used from an iphone.
The iphone uses safari as its browser. You can download this for use on windows and it should give you an accurate representation of how your app will look when rendered on an iphone. However in order to test how well your app performs on the phone, and if it really is usable using the touch screen the I think the only way to be really sure is to test using the iPhone.
You can use safari for windows to test the rendering but for your final tests you need to use a real iphone in order to understand how your users will experience it.
I'm working on a web application, and we are targeting the iPhone and iPod Touch. I'm familiar with the debugging tools for FireFox and IE (e.g. Firebug and IE Developer Toolbar), but I can't find anything for the iPod. I am not looking forward to using alert as my main debugging tool, especially when I expect mouse events to be one of the major issues.
Is this really the state of the art? What tools do you recommend?
Also, how similar is the html layout on an iPhone to that of Safari running on Windows? On a Mac?
The iPhone version of Safari includes a debug console that can be very handy. Settings > Safarai > Developer.
You can also use the Simulator in the iPhone SDK. There's no extra debugging, but it's easier than using a physical device all the time.
You can also use the desktop version of Safari for many things.
The web tools that target the iPod Touch and iPhone arenas include
[iPhone Remote Debug Console](
http://code.google.com/p/iphonedebug/)
BlackBaud Simulator for Windows
[MobileSafari Simulator](
http://www.testiphone.com/)
[iPhoney](
http://marketcircle.com/iphoney/)
While WebKit has a remote inspector, it is hard to enable on an actual iOS device (at least without jailbreak) and so most tools for it are simulator-only. iWebInspector looks promising for this, but keep in mind the simulator's WebKit library is not identical to the device's.
That's where weinre comes in. With weinre, you can "debug a web page displayed on your phone from your laptop". How it works is you run its custom HTTP server that hosts two things:
a JavaScript file you include on the page you want to debug
an Inspector page that you load on the machine you want to debug from
You start the server e.g. java -jar Downloads/weinre.jar --boundHost -all- --httpPort 4242 and then put a script tag like <script src="http://weinre-server-name.local:4242/target/target-script-min.js"> in the source code for your webpage and load the inspector by navigating to e.g. http://weinre-server-name.local:4242/client. When you load the target page on an iPhone on your local WiFi connection, the connection will show up in the client page on your mainframe and you can use the Inspector tabs to view/edit the page on the iPhone.
It has some limitations (no Javascript breakpoints and such) and can be a little laggy, but overall it's pretty magic.
There is also a nice tool called iWebInspector
http://www.iwebinspector.com/