PhoneGap screen sizes support - iphone

I am starting a project with PhoneGap and it will work on iPhone and Android devices. The question is how to implement support for different screen sizes and resolutions.
For example, I have an icon inside the application: small waves to run some action. What size of this icon should be to be shown well in all possible devices (iPhones/Androids). Should I include several versions of the same image?
The same question about text. How can I be sure the text will be readable and will stay in line on different devices?
thank you

If you are a MAC user you could give the new dreamweaver 5.5 a shot. It will structure your app and even build a debug version for testing. You can do this with either the ANDROID SDK or the iOS sdk. Of course, it will work on a PC as well but there is not support for the iOS sdk.
Using the Adobe Dreamweaver 5.5 it has specific mobile framework to recognize jqm or jqtouch and inserts phonegap.js on build into the packaged product. It also allows you to scale the testing screen for the different sizes of mobile devices. From android, iphone, to ipad(and more)
Here is an example: Dreamweaver with phonegap support

Related

How to embed flash files in iOS app

I have some flash files and i need to integrate those files in iPad app. i searched lot but everyone's answer is
- iOS will not support flash.
- even if you integrate flash files app store will not accept.
But my app is not for app store this is an enterprise app. Instead of integrating flash files we can do all the animation in our objective-c itself. But client is demanding to integrate flash files in iPad app. Is there any alternate solution. Please guide me.
Sure you can run Flash apps on iOS, you just have to build them using AIR:
Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime that enables you to use your
existing Flash/ActionScript or HTML/JavaScript development skills and
tools to build and deploy applications, games, and videos outside the
browser and on mobile devices.
Here is the specific resources page on how to build Flash ActionScript 3 apps targeting any iOS device.
The beauty of AIR is that if the code of your app is well organized, you can reuse most of it for any build being it for Android, iOS, Blackberry, or even a desktop app (windows and macosx) or the web.
Hybrid way:
Flash to html5 conversion then open HTML document using webview
Google swiffy:
Swf to HTML 5
Note:
maximum of 1 mb only be converted at present
Link:
click here
Adobe wallaby:
Fla to HTML 5
Note:
At present cs5 only supported.the lower versions have to be resaved in cs5 to convert.
Link:
click here
Native way:
Adobe air:
One could run actioscript flash content directly in ios devices.
Note:
At present you could make stand alone ios apps only you can't integrate with existing app.
Link:
click here
It is a detour only, but you could install the Photon browser and call it from your app.

Questions on Cross platform mobile app development

I have the following queries on using phonegap / Titanium appcelarator for our cross platform mobile development
Currently we want to develop iPhone compatible and android compatible app with single source code using the cross platform mobile SDKs
Can this phoneGap or Titanium appcelarator works with single source code on both the iPhone and Android platforms?
also is there any other platform works as such?
And how these application will be relased with Appstore / Android market place since they have single code base ( source code ).
Any helps would be greatly appreciated.
I have tried out Sencha Touch with PhoneGap and also Titanium.
Sencha touch is pretty easy as it is based on javascript and can be used with android and iphone. The app created with Sencha touch can later be wrapped inside phone gap and submitted to the appstore.
Titanium again uses javascript but they do some processing on it. So the app is native.
They do have some common api's that can be used for both iphone and android. But for some advanced features they have 2 seperate sets of api's for both android and iphone.
So both have some differences. And they are both acceptable in Appstore and android market place.
I have not tried Titanium, but one of my friends is using Corona. He said its support Android and iPhone, and easily port over. You will need at least, adjust the image size, AFAIK, the image size for iphone and androids(various size) are different.
Corona: Write once, build to both iOS and Android.
corona concentrates on games. it uses lua. if you want to build a cross platform application you should first design your application cross platform. android and ios are different os with different style guides.
i have experiences with titanium and it worked fine. but i experienced that a cross platform design is important since the most time of building the app was used for programming the user interface. so invest time in building a good mvc design and ui. after that it worked out easily.
Find answers for you question below.
Can this phoneGap or Titanium appcelarator works with single source code on both the iPhone and Android platforms?
Yes It can definitely work with single code base. in addition to this you can develop universal App that can run in tablet and handheld from single code base
(NOTE: however on some point you have to differentiate between iOS and Android as some of the functionalities are specific to iOS or Android System. Titanium provide constants to check between iOS and android. It also provides constants to differentiate between Tablet and Handheld devices)
also is there any other platform works as such?
Other than Android and iOS titanium provides support for blackberry and mobile web platforms also.
And how these application will be relased with Appstore / Android market place since they have single code base ( source code ).
You can build App for required platform from titanium it self.

Can we Integrate flash in iPhone application?

I want to integrate flash in my iPhone application so is it possible to integrate?
You can write apps in Flash that will run on the iPhone by using the Packager for iPhone. It only works with Flash and not Flash Builder. Adobe just released a revision after Apple changed its SDK license again so that it can run. Note that to run on the iPhone your app has to be compiled by Flash to a native iPhone app. You can't run just any SWF.
Also yesterday Adobe announced AIR 2.5 which claims to let you program for one runtime (AIR) and target multiple platforms including iPhone and iPad. The release notes explain that they will be updating their Packager to work with AIR 2.5 for feature parity with AIR 2.5 for Android.
There is an application called Packager for iPhone from Adobe, which can be used to make iPhone app from Flash. I never used it though, but I think you should give it a try.
No.
Adobe Packager appears to only be able to create entire apps, not library code that will integrate inside a larger app. There also is no complete Flash interpreter in a form that you might be able to bundle with your app (although there appear to be a few open source projects that claim to run a limited subset of Flash). Thus there is no way to integrate Flash into a larger iPhone application that will run offline.
Online, you might be able to run a Flash application remotely on a server, and serve the graphic results to an iPhone app using something like the VNC protocol.
A new parser called hiramkei will soon be available for adding Flash animation SWF files into Xcode projects for iPhone. Here is the site http://www.flash-on-iphone.com/demo

One frontend for iPhone/iPad, Android and Multi-Touch displays

I have built a multi-touch application which is based on a Java EE backend and combined with BlazeDS to a Adobe Flex frontend. The application runs on a DIY-Multi-Touch which I built. Now I want to use another solution. The Adobe Flex frontend (with a multitouch library) and the BlazeDS adapter should be replaced by a solution which covers iPhone/iPad, Android and commercial Multi-Touch displays.
The problem is the iPad/iPhone, there is no Flash Player runtime (not the jail-breaked ones), but the application should be runnable also on those devices. So Adobe Flex and a Java frontend (no JVM on the iPhone/iPad) is not possible anymore. At first, starting the developing of the application it was not neccessary, to run it on Apples mobile devices, but this changed :-(
So, what can I do, using HTML5? So I can use it for Android and iPhone/iPad. But I also want to make it possible to use it on a commercial multi-touch-display and normal display with a mouse (I only have gestures for one finger, the 2-finger gestures are not neccessary). Are there any frameworks that allow this? Because I do not want to create several frontends (App for iPhone/iPad on Objective-C and a Adobe Flex for all other devices), it would be great if I can build a frontend for all devices.
Does anyone know how I could realize this?
Best Regards Tim
Take a look at Sencha Touch, it's a HTML5 framework dedicated to iOS and Android devices, which should make it relatively easy to build web apps that feel like native apps on those devices.
The Adobe Flex frontend (with a
multitouch library) and the BlazeDS
adapter should be replaced by a
solution which covers iPhone/iPad,
Android and commercial Multi-Touch
displays.
Android 2.2 and higher supports the full Flash Player, and therefore also supports Flex applications. However, Adobe has spoken of improving such support for the next Flex release, expected out early next year.
Apple has kind of specifically said they want to prevent the type cross platform development you're trying to accomplish.
Without knowing, or seeing, your application it is hard to say whether HTML5 will support you. But, yes, many parts of HTML5 should work across multiple browsers.
You may want to investigate Elips Studio which brings ActionScript applications to multiple devices including apple devices.

Can I successfully do iPhone/iPad website development/testing on Windows?

Can I successfully do iPhone/iPad web development (not native apps) on Windows, and without having an iPhone/iPad device?
I.e. work like PSD-to-iPhone-optimized XHTML/CSS layout.
I’m interested to learn about and make iPhone/iPad optimized websites. Any tips? How different will it be from desktop? What’s different other than the smaller screen?
From experience I will say the only true way to test for the iPad is to test on an iPad. I have been developing a site in html5 specifically for an iPad and we initially used the iPhone to test. The drag function we had implemented with jQuery had worked almost perfectly on the iPhone but after the client had tested on the iPad they came back to us and said the function did not work period and they were correct.
I guess this could change depending on what type of development you are doing. From experience I would say either A. Make some trips to the apple store B. Make friends with iPad owner C. Buy and iPad
yes for an ipohne emulator... try MobiOne.
It's a good application to test the pages in iphone like environment.
http://www.genuitec.com/mobile/
I don’t think you can really do iPhone/iPad development successfully without an iPhone/iPad at all, whether on Windows, Mac or Commodore 64.
If you’re serious about iPhone/iPad development, how could you not try your software out yourself on the devices it’s going to run on? Your clients are going to want code that works on the iPhone/iPad. You need an iPhone/iPad to check that it works.
if your developing a web app then i think you can use this: http://ipadpeek.com/
The answer is: Yes you can absolutely do iPhone and iPad website development on a Windows PC.
However, you really should/must test the result on an actual iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. Especially if you are integrating in any way with special device features like the dialing feature of the phone. (Yes you can have phone numbers in a webpage trigger dialing when you tap on them.)
However, you can do the bulk of the development on Windows, testing the WebApp in Safari or Chrome, which are the most fully compliant HTML5 WebKit based browsers out there.
Also highly recommend using an HTML5 touch framework like jQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch. This will go a long way to ensuring that your WebApp is optimized for the screen size and touch gestures of the mobile devices.
Remember that you can't deploy a pure WebApp to the app store, only download it from a website. You'll need a native wrapper like PhoneGap for that. And to compile a PhoneGap wrapped WebApp you'll need XCode on a Mac.
But there's a lot of power in adding your WebApp to the home screen on iOS. No native code involved and you get a full screen webapp with a home screen icon, loading image and no browser toolbars. Highly recommended.