Is it possible (as in, allowed by Apple and maybe provided as an open-source static lib) to use WebKit on iOS? I have a special situation in which UIWebView doesn't offer me the control I need, so I would very much like to use WebKit. I know that UIWebView is based on it, but also shades it, so I can't actually call the methods I need.
Also, what other realistic options would I have for rendering HTML + CSS and execute Javascript?
Related
Is there a possible configuration for video.js that hides native controls on iPhone? I'd like to also be able to autoplay, but that's significantly less important. My main concern is to be able to use my nicely designed javascript controls, instead of the ugly, clunky native controls.
The video element is very constrained on iPhone. If you want to play HTML5 video at all, you have to use the native fullscreen player. iPads offer more freedom but are still limited compared to desktop browsers. Neither device allows autoplay. Apple's documentation has more details.
I'm making an app with CoronaSDK for custom camera button, frame and layout like "Leme Camera" in app store.
However, they don't support camera buffer so we can't use custom layout to control capturing camera which is not acceptable.
What I found out is PhoneGap also lack that feature. They show native camera window when I tap
Can anyone recommend other cross platform framework for that feature?
With the PhoneGap platform you are able to use a combination of objective C and the PhoneGap standard javascript library.
From what you have described, it sounds like you would want to go native for something like this! Most of all of these third party SDKs do not get very good performance but if you were to write the small computationally intensive camera part in objective C you get all the resources you need and are able to cut back on the amount of code you will need to port when you try to support additional platforms.
I need to have an intro video for a site which I need to work on all browsers including safari on the iphone and IE6. I am thinking of trying to do flash with a html5 fallback or vice versa.
Has anyone had any experience of attempting this? I need to try and get a smooth a transition from the video into the content of the website as possible. Am not sure what limitations exist on the iphone?
I know intro videos aren't well liked but this is a requirement for the site.
EDIT -
One thing I would really like to be able to do is play video in page on an iphone automatically, while it is looking like it isn't possible I need to know for sure as I have been told it may be using some combination of canvas and video elements or wrapping the video element in some way. I was sent the following link
http://html5doctor.com/video-canvas-magic/
You need to stop and determine what's more important: Supporting a browser that is over a decade old or supporting a platform that is growing rapidly. That's really it. But if you continue on that line of thought, you'll learn quickly that you can't do HTML5 animations in any stable version of IE currently anyways.
So, you have two options. Develop in HTML5 and place alternative text in it's place for all IE visitors or develop in Flash and place alternative text in it's place for all iOS devices. Honestly, doing the same video twice (Flash and HTML5) seems like wasted effort. (Even with Google's new "Swiffy" SWF -> HTML 5 convertor, it's good, but it's not perfect and it doesn't support audio.)
If it was me in your shoes, I'd go with HTML5. IE10 is right around the corner and it supports animations. HTML5 is the new standard and that's the way everything is going. It seems like the logical choice to me.
I want to know what is good start point to work on creating own GUI on iphone/objective-c. I've never done this part before, and I know I'm kinda attracted to make my own slick GUI, something like convertbot, which I really love :)
Any suggestion would be appreciated! Thanks
You might want to check out the Design Then Code tutorials written by Mike Rundle. I've heard good things about them.
Also, Tapworthy is a good read for those wanting to learn about designing interfaces for iPhone.
Interface builder is quite powerful to build UI. However you could start creating custom views in objective-c and that would mean learing how to write code in objective-c.
To be a little more complete, you could have included Fireworks among the apps that can be used to design for iPhone. I hope you won’t mind me plugging it here :)
Adobe Fireworks (http://www.adobe.com/fireworks) is also an excellent application for designing and prototyping for the iPhone. With this vector toolkit from MetaSpark (http://blog.metaspark.com/2009/02/fireworks-toolkit-for-creating-iphone-ui-mockups/), you can use the iPhone interface elements in Fireworks to quickly create prototypes. Fireworks has a nice feature called Pages, that allows designing each of the screens of your iPhone app. Then you can use the Hotspots feature to link buttons to the various Pages/screens in your app. Very quick and easy.
Luke Kilpatrick shows Robert Scoble how this is done in this video: http://www.building43.com/videos/2009/06/23/mockup-iphone-app-adobe-fireworks/
When your design is complete, you have several options for sharing it with clients and other stakeholders:
+ Export to PDF from Fireworks, which you can send to clients to review using the commenting features in the PDF
+ Export to HTML and Images from Fireworks to view your prototype in the Browser
+ Export to AIR from Fireworks to create an AIR prototype
+ Export to HTML and a Dreamweaver Library from Fireworks and use this jQuery trick (http://unitid.nl/2009/04/prototyping-for-the-iphone-using-fireworks-cs3/) to get the app running on your iPhone without learning Objective C. The jQuery hides the Safari Chrome so it looks and feels like a native app, but ti is running in the Safari browser on the iPhone.
+ Use jQTouch (http://www.jqtouch.com/) which uses a similar method to the above
I’m hearing of people using Fireworks to design and prototype for all kinds of mobile devices such as the ,iPhone 4, iPhone 4 Cases, Palm webOS (Pre and Pixi), BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc. In fact, people use it for other screen design too, set-top boxes like the TiVo, PS3, Xbox, interactive kiosks, proprietary medical devices, in car interface screens – really any device with a screen.
Thanks!
Pat Siregar
Read Apple's Human Interface Guidelines:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/Introduction/Introduction.html
There is a lot of useful information there about how to design good UI's.
Once you are familiar and have practiced the things mentioned there, then you can think about designing more complex UI elements.
I want to make a small app that displays a PDF, presenting zoom-able single pages with a previous-next page function.
The Core Graphics API is pretty much the same in Cocoa and Cocoa touch. Read up on CGPDFDocument, it should provide you with everything you will need to render PDF pages. You won't need to read the PDF spec or use a library to parse PDF files directly. You will probably to learn more about Core Graphics / Quartz 2D / etc. to understand how to use those functions inside of a Cocoa app.
Based on the gradually evolving Apple policy of rejecting application submissions that duplicate functionality already on the iPhone I would worry about spending too much time even as a newbie on something that is part of the core iPhone feature-set.
This is pretty trivial. The CGPDFDocument functions will allow you to do anything you'd want to do with a PDF file.
The iPhone and iPod touch can view PDFs already, as one of the TV adverts in the UK shows an email with a .pdf attachment (of swimming lessons) being viewed. It can also view .doc, .xls, and so on, so if he is creating a viewer type application then supporting those as well could be a nice feature addition later on.
This means there is a PDF framework on these devices that you will need to access. Presumably Apple can provide support here if he is a paid up developer. Syncing the PDFs to the device is the actual real difficulty, as this isn't supported by iTunes. I assume that you would need to write a network based synchronisation tool, or have an online cloud for holding people's PDFs.
The device doesn't support Flash, so using PDF to Flash conversion tools will not work.
I found this HTML5 framework that should work on an iPad http://bakerframework.com/
but I didn't test it yet.