Has anyone successfully used WebKit in Delphi?
WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications.
I want to create an iPhone/iPad Mobile Simulator same as in electricplum. (I have tried the FREE version - seems like it also uses Adobe AIR).
With Safari browser we have the most accurate preview results for iPhone mobile sites. so I would like to embed the WebKit (that is used by Safari) in my application, so my customers can have a reliable preview of their mobile web sites.
I have searched the web, but could not find a working code. (The best I could find was this, but it's not working).
The 3 main problems with Delphi Chromium Embedded suggested in the answers are that:
It does not support D5
I can overcome the fact that there is no support for D5 (creating the component with D7 in a separate process or DLL) But, It is very unstable! I have tested it with D7: Random access violations.
It does not render HTML pages with div layout/HTML5 same as Safari does (or electricplum - "Electric Mobile Simulator").
Have a look at DelphiChromiumEmbedded. It's not Safari, but it is Webkit based at least...
The reliability of that is not going to be very good. In a corporate environment you might want to just put a mac on the network with the iPad/iPhone simulator from xcode, and script it to open your site and take screenshots.
Or even write a iOS program to open a webkit view with your site, and just put an iPad on the network.
Taking a screenshot
Open a webpage
Running in the background
Sending mail directly through smtp
And take a look at this question and answer
You might want to consider how much work a delphi webkit is going to be compared to just buying a mac. The upgrade cycle is going to be painful whatever route you take, but quality is going to be much better with the mac/iPad.
Related
I need to develop a website which will be used exclusively on iPhone and iPad. I don't have those devices, neither do I have a Mac.
What are the possible free solutions for me to be able to test the website during development?
The most obvious one would be to use an iPhone SDK, but since it costs $100/year but since it is available only for Mac, it is not a solution in my case.
Download Safari 5 for Windows, enable the Developer Menu features and change the User Agent to Mobile Safari iPad or Mobile Safari iPhone. This will let you see how your website looks when an iPad or iPhone renders it. Just make the window smaller to get the full experience.
If analyst predictions are right, there will soon likely be an abundance of iPhone 3G devices on eBay as lots of people are eligible to upgrade to iPhone 4 tomorrow. Picking up a cheap 3G may be the best solution to your testing requirements.
Or you can test it out at an Apple Store if your website is accessible over the internet or available on a laptop with an ad-hoc WiFi connection.
You can test your website in any browser, but yes, mobile browser probably behave different at some points.
If you cannot find a mobile web browser simulator for iPhone than the "cheapest" alternative would probably be an iPod touch.
Update:
You might want to have a look at iBBDemo:
iBBDemo2 - Cross Platform iPad and iPhone Simulator
You could try using something like:
www.testiphone.com/
Recommend you use jsconsole
Remotely debug a mobile web app
jsconsole.com is a simple JavaScript command line tool. However, it also provides the ability to bridge across to other browser windows to remotely control and debug that window - be it in another browser or another device altogether.
In fact, mobile web app debugging is so damn tricky, that I gave up, and decided to build this very tool instead. See the videos examples if you'd rather see this in action now.
Creating a session
To create a new session, in the jsconsole prompt, simply run:
:listen
This will yield a unique key along the lines of FAE031CD-74A0-46D3-AE36-757BAB262BEA. Now using this unique key, include a anywhere in the web app that you wish to debug:
<script src="http://jsconsole.com/remote.js?FAE031CD-74A0-46D3-AE36-757BAB262BEA"></script>
Now any calls to console.log from your web app will display the result in the jsconsole session that is listening to your key. Equally, if you run a command in the jsconsole session, the code will injected in to your web app and the result returned to jsconsole.
In addition to generating a new code with :listen, you can also ask jsconsole to listen to a predefined code (but for your own security, try to chose something unique that only you know):
:listen FAE031CD-74A0-46D3-AE36-757BAB262BEA
Now I can use the same remote key in my web app to avoid having to regenerate a new code each time. Note that only the last remote client (i.e. your web app) to connect to jsconsole will recieve remote debug calls - previous windows will be ignored.
To know when the web app has connected, jsconsole will notify you by showing your the userAgent string for the device:
:listen FAE031CD-74A0-46D3-AE36-757BAB262BEA
Creating connection...
Connected to "FAE031CD-74A0-46D3-AE36-757BAB262BEA"
Connection established with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8
A word of warning
Note that this technique is also injecting code directly in to your web app - this tool should only be used for debugging. I can't take respibility for how you use this tool, basically: take care!
Current known support
Remote debugging has been developed to work on all platforms, even if the technology isn't supported. However, jsconsole remote debugging has specifically tested and working on the follow mobile devices (feel free to add to this list):
iOS 4.2.x - iPad, iPhone 4
Andriod 2.2.2 - Nexus One
webOS - Palm Pre
There are some Video examples too
More detailed information please see this links:
http://jsconsole.com/remote-debugging.html
There are some obvious things here:
1)Work very hard to make your site work on all major browsers - including Safari and any other mobile devices other than iPad... this will let you make sure it works on smaller screens well.
2)Read up on known glitches in these browsers and see if you can avoid them.
3)Whenever you are with friends showing off their iPad, or who have an iPhone, ask to test your site on it.
I need to develop a website which will be used exclusively on iPhone and iPad
This seems a bad idea. if it's only used on iPad/iPhone, surely you should write an App and get all the benefits of UI, etc.
Websites should not be tied to specific devices.
This is not 1998 : Best viewed in I.E. In fact your suggestion is worse than that.
If you really want a website that only works on those devices then you'll need to check the user-agent string, but otherwise html is html and unlike what Apple may want you to believe, works just as well on Symbian, Blackberry, Android, S40, Windows, Windows Mobile, etc etc..
(In fact, it works better on Symbian as Symbian actually supports Flash.)
On the Mac I got the iPhone Simulator but under Windows and Linux enviroments I need a webbrowser which emulates the behaviour and size of the iPhone browser. I'm not looking for a website with a frame with the iPhone screen size but an actual application. Prefably webkit based so it will behave as much like the iPhone as possible. It should also be able to send the same browser headers as MobileSafari in the iPhone and if not it should be possible to modify the headers. That could be done in a menu in the program, support plugins(which have the power to modify headers) or the progam should be opensource.
It might not exist and if not thanks anyway. However if it does that would be awesome. If you know a program which have some of the mentioned features but not all of them an no one have posted a better one feel free to post a link/the name of that browser (still better then nothing or a framed site in Safari).
tldr: iPhone like browser, same window size and headers as MobileSafari.
Try one of the following:
Blackbaud iPhone Browser Simulator
iPhone Drift web browser for Windows
MobiOne iPhone and Palm Pre emulator
So far as I can see, only the first of these actually uses Safari as the rendering engine, and it is using Safari for Windows rather than Mobile Safari, but it should be close enough I think.
try iphonedrift on windows
I have an iPhone web app I'm producing on a Linux machine. What's the best browser I can use to most closely mimic the feature-limited version of Safari present on the iPhone? (It's a "slimmed down" version of WebKit, which is more limited than one might think.)
A used iPod Touch for US$150 (used, in Seattle). It's either that, or the iPhone simulator running on a Mac. If one is specifically targeting "iPhone web app", the cost should be budgeted into the project.
Barring that, use desktop Safari. That will still require a Windows or Mac box. The rendering engine is the same, so I imagine it's as close as you're going to get on the desktop.
On the other hand, what are the problems you are trying to avoid? Mobile Safari is pretty good at rendering most web sites I call up. There are guidelines for development, and avoid media such as Flash. If you don't have the hardware, borrow it for sanity checking when you're done. That's the route I'd go if I absolutely didn't want to spend the US$150.
I am looking for iPhone emulation software to test a couple of internal web applications against the iPhone. There are a few quirks occuring with iPhone users that would like to fix but I am unsure how to test them.
For example one of the issues is that numbers are showing up as phone number links on the iPhone which 99% of the time is incorrect. On regular Windows Safari this doesn't occur.
There are also formatting issues with fonts and spacing that occur on no other broswer except the iPhone version of Safari.
Emulator must be free and work under Windows. Suggestions?
There is a Windows build of WebKit embedded inside an iPhone-like shape called Blackbaud iPhone Browser Simulator. You can download it here http://labs.blackbaud.com/NetCommunity/article?artid=662
If you're looking for general WebKit issues, Safari 4 and Chrome use fairly similar builds of WebKit. Most issues can be troubleshooted in that manner.
For things like the automated tel://########## hyperlinking, though, you're likely SOL. That's an iPhone specific customisation of WebKit. It can be disabled (details in someone else's answer here) but you're not going to be able to test for the behaviour on Windows.
Another iphone webkit emulator :
http://www.genuitec.com/mobile/
Build by genuitec, the creators of myEclipse. It's better than using safari desktop as it's a modified version of webkit in order to have the same behavior than safari iPhone. But in reality, it's not 100% equal !
I want to develop a mobile web application using asp.net 3.5 that can be viewed on an iPhone but there is no longer a template in VS2008 to enable mobile development. Can this be done ?
the iphone uses the "regular" version of your website so developing a "mobile" version would nto accomplish what you're looking for. You should check the browser headers and redirect people to the iPhone version of your site if you detect mobile safari.
http://iphone.facebook.com/
Another option (if you're using MVC) is to have your controller detect the browser and show a different view if it catches mobile safari. This way you wouldn't need a duplicate site, just two sets of views.
A web application (via Asp.Net 3.5) would be accessible over the Internet and would be accessible via the iPhone's Safari browser. There isn't anything truly special you need for it unless you want to make a true web application for mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberries. In that case, you are looking purely at design aspects since it's still just a website. Due to the diversity of mobile browser capabilities, you'll need to do some research to find out what is recommended for the specific mobile browsers you want to access (the BBC's website comes to mind as a good example of mobile rendering).
Ultimately, the user agent is evaluated by your system and then it renders (or redirects) appropriately. Everything else is design if you want the page to render differently for the iPhone than any other browser on the web.
If you can get your hands on a copy of .Net magazine (a.k.a. Practical Web Design in the U.S.) issue 178, there is a great article on what you need to be aware of when doing mobile development and how the iPhone's browser is a lot different than others.
The iPhone (at least mine which is the 3G version) have full support for "normal" web apps with Ajax and everything. So mostly any Ajax library would be 100% compatible with the iPhone, at least as long as the Ajax library is focusing on Open Standards and such...
[Shameless-Plug I work with Ra-Ajax]
Ra-Ajax have 100% support for iPhone except for "dragging and dropping" which interferes with scrolling on the iPhone. This means that you can use Ra-Ajax (which is an LGPL licensed and Free of Charge library for ASP.NET) to create a "normal" website which will work 100% perfectly (except for dragging and dropping, which is used in e.g. Ra-Windows etc) on the iPhone...
Even the really "advanced" stuff like our Ajax Calendar sample works flawlessly with the iPhone :)