Can we build an Application using UIWebView that will entirely mimic the Safari Browser?
Are there any cases where UIWebview can not do what that can be done in Safari?
For one thing, you have a separate cookie storage per app. So if a user has some preferences at site X within Safari, it won't have those preferences at site X within your browser, and vice versa. Apart from that a UIWebView is very much like the real thing.
You cannot easily build an application that mimics the Safari browser using the public API exposed by UIWebView component. For one thing, please look at the UIWebView delegate methods. When you have frames inside the page you want to load, you may have a hard time telling if a user has clicked inside an iframe/frame or clicked on a link in the main document.
Dealing with authentication to site with invalid certificates is also hard with the UIWebView component, especially when the site with invalid certificate is reached by clicking a link inside an iframe.
Rendering content in UIWebView will be much slower than it is in Safari.
Safari's Javascript engine uses a "just in time" compiler. It takes the incoming Javascript code and transforms it on the fly into machine code that can run directly on the iOS device's ARM CPU. This allows Javascript code to run at a speed similar to a native app's code.
The problem is that Apple doesn't trust third-party developers with this power. If a third-party app had the power to convert Javascript into machine code and run it, that app would also have the power to download and run other pieces of machine code—and Apple would never get the chance to review that code. Once App Review approved it, (developers/hackers) can change the downloaded code into something that logs your passwords or something. And there's no way to grant this power only to UIWebView and not to other parts of an app, because UIWebView runs in the same process as the developer's code.
So basically Apple forbids this because allowing it would break the security provided by the App Store and make iOS more vulnerable to attack. They can allow it for Safari because they control what Safari does, but they can't trust others not to abuse that ability.
Related
I know I can use the apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style meta tag and after adding the web page to the home screen, it will run the app in full screen mode.
My question is if there is any tag, css or javascript I can use to tell mobile safari to do it directly, without having the user adding to the home screen first?
You could consider something like PhoneGap that deploys a webapp as a native iphone application. It would also allow you access to things like the accelerometer via javascript calls.
Currently, and sadly, this can't be done :(
There is a way of automatically installing 'webclips' on your idevice.
You do this by deploying a profile payload to your device (.mobileconfig file).
Payloads can be signed or unsigned, for testing purpose unsigned profiles will come up as Insecure.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/featuredarticles/iPhoneConfigurationProfileRef/Introduction/Introduction.html
The advantage using a profile like this is that you can set it so the user cannot remove the 'webclip' in the standard way, having to remove the profile to remove the app. You can also protect this with a PIN.
One reason I didn't use this method for registering my apps was that I couldn't get it working offline with appcache manifests (iOS6.x), however this may have improved since iOS7.x
I have a fairly standard ASP.Net web application which is used via mobile safari on the iPhone.
Some users who have a link to the web application placed on their desktop via profile are reporting that when navigating between pages (which I do on the server with Response.Redirect after specific events or via standard anchor tags in other cases (no target specified)) that Safari opens a new window instead of reusing the existing window.
Because of this, any login token/cookie etc (i'm using the built-in ASP.Net membership stuff), is now gone for that new browser window and the login prompt is shown.
The problem doesn't happen every time, and I can't seem to replicate it on my device (but i'm not deploying the shortcut via profile)
As you can probably imagine, it's quite frustrating for the users to have to log in every time, and you can't fix an issue you can't replicate.
My question is, has anyone heard of this issue and/or know a workaround?
The app is NOT iPhone specific, that is, it is used in a full desktop browser as well, and the logins stay like you'd expect there - and the same window is reused repeatedly.
I've considered a few possibilities, but have been drawing a blank as far as what might be causing this or how I can resolve it.
Do you have any iPhone meta tags set (to remove the url bar or the toolbar, for instance?) If you do, the phone will assume it's a native web app, and urls will open in a new safari window, like they would for any other native app.
If you are taking advantage of using the web app in full screen mode (where it is bookmarked to the launch screen next to native apps) you can prevent it from jumping out of fullscreen mode by and in to safari replacing type links with javascript.
location.href = '/yourPath';
This is a nifty trick which even works if you are linking to an outside URL, like doing an OAuth to Facebook and back.
I have a blog post on this here: http://www.aaroncoleman.net/post/2011/07/29/Keeping-iPhone-Web-App-in-Fullscreen-mode-from-Homescreen-Launcher.aspx
I'm wondering if anyone has apps that have been accepted by Apple that rely on loading external mobile web pages as the app. Building Phonegap based apps would be a lot easier if I could load sections of the app directly from my server, I'm not sure if Apple allows this though.
I don't see any problems with an app which loads content from your servers. If I'm not mistaken the iPad App Store does the same.
Loading external JavaScript is definitely a no-no. Loading content should be OK, so as long as those pages don't have any JavaScript (or too much JavaScript), you should be good. That's kind of the problem with IOS development, you never know what Apple is going to decide breaks their TOS. Basically I think they want to be reviewing the Application as a whole, and not having you able to slip new functionality in without their approving it (so you can't get an app approved and then change it so that it violates the TOS after it is approved).
Why would you expect it to be rejected? There are browsers in the app store, and all they do is load external content.
The cross-domain security policy applies to external web pages.
The cross-domain security policy does not affect PhoneGap applications. Since the html files are called by webkit with the file:// protocol, the security policy does not apply.
(in Android,you may grant android.permission.INTERNET to your app by edit the AndroidManifest.xml)
You should try fetching data from server not whole page with Js.
I have read some post about apps programming for Iphone and Android, but I have one question. Is it posible when there is a mobile website optimized for mobile phones, that I can create apps for Iphone, Android, Win 7 and Blackberry, that only statrts the browser as instance and display the mobile website? What do you think, is this ok? Do you have any ideas or examples for that kind of apps? I mean this is not an app, that should be has access to the hardware of the phone, only web app.
Thanks
Nik
This would work.
You could create an app that consists merely of a webview into which you load your content. The content could be loaded over the mobile network or be stored locally.
However most users (including yours truly) strongly dislike apps that merely present a single website to the user, because of the long delays if the content is loaded over the mobile network every time and because the UI is, in many cases, very different to what the he or she is used to from native apps.
Most users fail to see the need for a specialized app just to visit a website which they could as well keep as a favorite in their mobile browser. On the iPhone, you may even add favorite websites as icons on your homescreen, so there is no need for apps presenting a single website at all.
It's not only possible, such things are already done. One example I know of is cookd, a restaurant guide for Vienna. But there are some constraints; for example, cookd requires GPS data for the "Nearby" option; on my Android phone (HTC Legend), this is possible when I open the web page directly in the browser (the browser asks if I want to allow cookd.com to get this info); but the same webpage, running in an application that does nothing more than display the browser component, cannot do that. To fix that, they would have to build GPS reception into the app and forward this info to the browser component.
O'reilly has a fantastic article about this:
http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/
This is a little bit directed to iPhone only, but will give you a good overview about the topic and possibilities.
Sorry for the long explanation. Thanks in advance to all who are taking their time.
I am an Ubuntu user who has set up Titanium Developer on a MacMini in order to build an app for the iPhone (and ultimately some other platforms).
Rather than having any local code built in, the app simply points to my website. To do that, all I needed to do was change Titanium's tiapp.xml file to include my website URL. I wrote no other code, nor did I need to include any other files. It simply compiled and ran in the emulator without a hitch.
I've got just one problem: I need to upload files to my website and Apple, as most of you know, has disabled the input field type=file. I've got it working in all other browsers. The action simply calls a php file and passes the file info.
If I didn't have an app, and someone was just manually navigating to my site with the iPhone's Safari browser, I could get around the problem by using CliqCliq, which is a very cool iPhone app. Basically, I use JavaScript window.open() to launch CliqCliq's QuickPic browser in a second Safari window. The user chooses a file; QuickPic uploads it; and the user is returned to the second Safari window that I launched with window.open(). The user closes the window and Safari returns them to the first window (i.e., my website).
The problem is that my website is being shown in my app. (By the way, I don't have my developer license yet, even though I signed up a few weeks ago, and I can't test this in the emulator because I can't install QuickPic into it, I assume.) I wanted to repeat the same steps, described in the previous paragraph, using an iFrame but that didn't seem to work (i.e., the iFrame was blank despite my designating a src). I also tried having a hidden window by using old-fashioned frames and setting the col-width to 0. That also did not work (i.e., Safari, if I recall correctly, opened a separate window).
I'm working a little blind, since I can't test anything on the iPhone, but I figure I have two options: I can either find a way to launch a QuickPic in an iFrame -or- I can find some way to incorporate the Apple toolkit file chooser into the Titanium app.
The problem with the first option -- but again, I don't know until I can try this on the iPhone -- is that I assume both apps (mine and CliqCliq's) could not run at the same time. Even if I had a hidden window, invisible iFrame, etc., the moment it launches QuickPic, I assume my app would quit(?).
The problem with the second option is that I don't have clue as to how to incorporate a file picker into my app by using Titanium (keeping in mind, everyone, that I know very little). Brian at CliqCliq has even offered to give me some code if I can't make Apple's file picker work but again, I'm not sure what to do next.
What do you folks think? What's the best method? And, what's the easiest thing for a simpleton to do?
Thanks.
<input type="file"> is not supported on the iPhone. You'll need to use Titanium's APIs, specifically the Media one (openPhotoGallery or showCamera).
As a side note, Apple reportedly rejects apps that are just a webview displaying a website. You may want to consider putting most of the app code in local storage and using AJAX to fetch content.