I have a native iPhone app, which has a UIWebView component to it. I am trying to see if I can replicate the "Add to Home Screen" button that is present in the tab bar options in Safari.
Is this possible inside a UIWebView within a native app?
Thanks!
Brett
[I presume your question is about replicating the action associated with add to home screen, rather than replicating the appearance of the button itself (which being pedantic is what you actually wrote).]
As others have said this isn't possible.
What you could do is programatically launch Safari from within your app and give it the URL of a page to load which is your page.
When your page is loaded it has some sort of animation and shows the user where the add to home screen button is and tell them to press it after clicking a link which is displayed in your web page. When the users click on the link it takes them to whatever page it is that you would like saved to the desktop, and you hope they follow your instructions.
If you register your app to handle a proprietary url scheme the users can get back to your app from within Safari by clicking on a link using your app's url scheme.
The web pages that you seed Safari with must however be remote pages, you cannot give Safari a page in your app's bundle or that your app has downloaded as Safari cannot read pages from your app's sandbox.
The short answer is no, you can't. Apple does not let you.
Here's a similar question which may help you come up with other possibilities:
Javascript for "Add to Home Screen" on iPhone?
If I had to think of a work around off the top of my head, you could create an javascript pop-up which instructs them how to. It could say something like tap this button to go to mobile safari then tap action -> add to home screen.
Execute the Javascript with UIWebView's method:
- (NSString *)stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:(NSString *)script
Hope this helps.
You can use UIActivityViewController with your url as the activity items
NSArray *activityItems = #[title, url];
And then you can exclude the activities that you don't want. I think it´s the only way for now.
Related
enter image description hereI want to open the app store when I click a certain button but, I have looked everywhere, and the code I have tried takes me to a safari link or doesn't do anything at all. can anyone help me? what i want it to achieve is that i hit the button and it opens up the app store with my specified app
UPDATE: i tried the method below and it opened oped up safari saying it could open the page
Zenprogrammer79 if your using the iOS simulator the link won't work because there is no App Store on the simulator but it should work on a real iOS device
zenProgrammer79 if you have a link to another app in the App Store, you can put this code in the section of where your button gets pressed (the IBAction) (objective-c)
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"link to the application link looks like https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/sugar-calculator/id1000071935?mt=8"]];
if you are using swift i believe this will work
UIApplication.sharedApplication().openURL(NSURL(string: "https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/sugar-calculator/id1000071935?mt=8")!)
if this doesn't work then your link to the app is probably wrong.
It's easy to detect how a full-screen WebApp (i.e., WebApps that include <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">) was launched – just check window.navigator.standalone
Is it possible to do the same for a non-full screen WebApp?
I want to show the user a "bookmark this web page" bubble (like on http://youtube.com), but I don't want to show it if the web page was launched from the home screen.
I'm pretty sure this is possible since YouTube is a non-full screen WebApp and it doesn't show the "bookmark me!" bubble when its launched from the home screen
I might be missing something in your question, but: window.navigator.standalone is telling if the app is currently in full screen mode or not (if the browser supports this property at all).
That means: if the property is there and it is false, you might want to offer your bookmark button. If it is there and true, don't show it (app is already bein run from home screen). If the property is missing, don't show the bookmark button because the user agent does not support it.
Try to visit www.luscarpa.com for instance. Use Safari and then bookmark it to your home screen and notice the difference.
It also has info about the fullscreen mode (that's where I have learned about it): http://www.luscarpa.com/development/make-your-website-an-iphone-web-application/
Horace, you can study Google's commented javascript source code, which appears they may have used in their YouTube bubble detection scheme, at
http://code.google.com/p/mobile-bookmark-bubble
if ('standalone' in navigator && !navigator.standalone && (/iphone|ipod|ipad/gi).test(navigator.platform) && (/Safari/i).test(navigator.appVersion)) {
document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" href="add2home.css">');
document.write('<script type="application/javascript" src="add2home.js"><\/s' + 'cript>');
}
that's a little script that came from cubiq.org/add-to-home-screen seems to get the job done
of course, if you're not using the add2home script then you should change the filenames.
look at the youtube website url opened in the Safari, in the last part of the url, there has a home/?bmb=1, i think that bmb=1 is actually making the difference, when you bookmark this page, the url will include this bmb variable, then when you press the home web button, on the server side you can detect this and know it is from home web button.
When a user launches "new window" link in a home screen app.
In Mobile Safari this type of action would open a new tab. What happens if the app is on the home screen and has name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable", content="yes" active.
Will the window still technically be in another tab, although you cant get back to the original one - or will it just navigate within the current tab?
First of all, unfortunately window.open method does not work at all.
Instead, a < a href="..". >...< /a > works and by default launches Safari and opens the link in a normal browser window (so, if the user wants to come back to the app, he has to doubleclick the iPad key and switch back to it).
You can force the link to open inside the app (so replacing the current page) with the tricks listed here: iPhone Safari Web App opens links in new window
Hei, I found a brilliant way to have a "window.open" effect in an iOS webapp too!
It loads a page in a Safari tab and has solved my problem, maybe it can be useful to others: http://webdeveloper.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1161159&postcount=14
It's also a great way to avoid the popup blocker (the blocker would stop a window.open(url) call but it doesn't stop that method) :-)
such that when the user open the application the website referenced will be loaded in the web browser
I know the code the will open a URL with in an application
[NSURL URLWithString:#"http://www.apple.com"]];
But this is not what I need I need the application to display the web browser within its form.
If you are only to show one page I suggest you should use ModalViewController to present the page inside your app and put a UIWebView in it.
If you are to render the web page as an application than you should use UIWebView
If you want to present some pages but also want to make use of navigation functions of the safari inside your app you can use DLWebView framework which suppors ModalView with navigation function.
Here you can watch the video how it works: http://dlinsin.github.com/2011/04/24/DLWebView.html
You need UIWebView class : UIWebView Class Reference
Also you can try to search for a ready webview with all needful buttons.
Have you looked into UIWebView?
If you need browser functionality within your own app, you will need to create your own, i.e. it's not possible to embed the Safari browser within a view in your own app.
Is it possible to Launch Safari without having the app close? Just like the in-app email compose window.
I'm aware of how to display a webpage in UIWebView. I'd like to use a full web browser, i.e. Safari.
You can use a UIWebView to display web content in your app.
You can create a UIWebView with the URL to display. It will follow any links that the user touches, but that won't give you the address bar, search, navigation buttons, bookmarks or the page (tab) control. Those you'll have to add yourself, but odds are you don't want all of that. (Do you really need Google searches in your app?)
Creating a controller to manage a UIWebView and as much or as little navigation as you need is pretty easy. With a little planning, your custom controller class will also a good thing to keep in your library for the next app.
No you can not make use of the full Safari from within your own application. Your application must terminate for Safari to open.
In iPhone OS 2.0 you also had to terminate in order to send e-mails, so some chance exists that Apple couls open up Safari in the same way for iPhone OS 4.0. Make sure to request it at http://bugreport.apple.com if you are eager.
The second best option currently available is to roll your own "Browser view controller" using UIWebView. Let it have back, forward, stop/reload buttons, and an extra button for opening in Safari if the user is not content. This is how many of the greatest apps our there, like Tweetie, does it.