I'm working on a web site that includes creating appointments on the mobile site. I have to make it work on IE Mobile.
The biggest challenge is to come up with a way to do date selection on a mobile site that:
Is compact enough to not take forever to load on the limited-bandwidth cell network.
Will work on Windows Mobile 6
Prevents the user from inputing any values (free-form text box is out of the question)
The options I've come up with so far are:
Drop-down lists for year, month, day (and client or server validation to ensure the validity of the selections, i.e. don't allow Feb. 31st)
Use a jQuery plugin & hope jQuery can run on every device I'm targeting (IE Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone)
Write some sort of elaborate IFrame AJAX lightbox that contains a basic calendar selector (that is, not reliant on jQuery), similar to what Google does on its mobile calendar site.
Since I can't seem to come up with any really solid ideas I wanted to see what the SO community could come up with as a decent solution for mobile date entry.
Have you thought about masking input? I'm not sure how well it will meet your needs, but it's worth a shot. Here's a jQuery implementation:
http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin/
Edit: After thinking about this some more, I would probably go with either the lightbox calendar idea you had or dropdowns. The benefit of dropdowns would be that you could enhance the input method for users that have better Javascript support. For example, you could hide the dropdowns and provide a dummy pop-out calendar that, when used, popluates values into the dropdowns.
Keep in mind you should ALWAYS do validation at the server. If you can do it at the client as well (or at least keep input limited) then that is a bonus feature to increase usability.
I would go with your first option
Drop-down lists for year, month, day
(and client or server validation to
ensure the validity of the
selections, i.e. don't allow Feb.
31st)
All the other options might work on particular phones but you going to constantly running into the issue of hey.... it doesn't work on my phone.
I would so love JavaScript to become standardised on the phone
Are you working with ASP.NET? If yes, then have a look at the following links:
ASP.NET mobile
Mobile Web Development with
ASP.NET
A calendar control is available and although I haven't tested it myself, it should work alright with mobile IE.
Related
I want to build simple web based app, where users, for example, could push the spacebar button, and then do something further, like answer a question, and while other users at the same time only sees that this question is not available any more for answer. When user submits answer, everyone see it.
All right, here is an example. I have seen TV shows, where four players have one button, if one or two of them know answer, they hit a button, and one lamp turns on and the first is allowed to answer, while other keeps their mouths shut. I want to build the same idea, but in the web.
But problem is that, I don't know where to start, what keywords I should search for help on google and so on. I see, that it might work on HTML5, maybe JavaScript and so on.
I have idea using Ajax, but request it every second to get latest actions made seems rubbish. Also I found one service called Pusher, but it has limited users in one time, which doesn't fit my needs.
I need just ideas. Thanks.
Before you read the rest, a disclaimer: I work for Realtime.co but I do believe I can help here so I'm not trying to "pitch a sale".
You can check out Realtime (www.realtime.co). It's basically a set of tools for developers to use real time technologies on their projects. It uses websockets but does fallback to whatever the user's browser supports (such as long polling, for example).
Behind Realtime you have a one-to-one/one-to-many/many-to-many messaging system that will transport your messages to and from your users.
There's also a plus which is the fact that the Realtime framework is actually cross-platform. This means that you can even have your web users communicate with iPhone users, Android, users, Windows Phone, desktop applications, server applications, etc..
You can learn about the JavaScript API here: http://docs.xrtml.org/getting_started/hello_message.html#javascript.
You only need to register at Realtime.co as a developer and start using the free license.
I really hope that helps.
Okey, I think I will go with node.js.
Writing all this previous post, made me think in right way :)
We are looking at building a b2b application for the iPhone. A major concern is the possible delay in publishing updates to the applications. I would like to believe that all updates will be orderly, but the reality of a newly found bug for a client or an upcoming trade show could mean that updating the application NOW is critical. Even an "expedited" day wait would not be acceptable.
One option I have thought of is having a flag for each page that we send down when the user logs into our server. If the flag is set, then instead of the native screen for a given page, there would be a page with a UIWebView that would get the latest HTML from the web or stored HTML loaded at the time of login.
I would prefer storing the HTML and using it "offline" because a data connection cannot be guaranteed.
The questions are:
1) Does this violate any of Apple's licensing?
2) Is this feasible or is there a hole I am not thinking of?
It doesnt violate Apple's guidelines and as far as I know you are not missing anything here...in fact, we have the exact same problem in my company (which on top of the issue that you have, we have customers that would like to "brand" the app for their users, and thats how we accomplish that) and there are no issues with apple (for now...:)). Obviously, you need to think of user experience implications...hope that helps.
have developed some quite good basic Facebook App development experience, can hook apps up to databases, have different info installed and displayed on different tabs no probs. However, everything Ive been doing so far to date revolves around me manually going into my developer account and setting up each apps settings individually, one at a time. Am curious to figure out how people like tabsite have created an interface that captures users input data and displays on tabs (that part i understand) but also it registers new apps each time on the fly (this part am curious about how its done), allowing them to add individual app logos, tabnames etc without the user ever having to go anywhere near the developer set up. And how are tabsite getting data back from the developer such as app_id or app_secret??
Any insight much appreciated.
Regards Tony
As I recall there isn't a way to register an app using the API. They probably just use only one app, and then check the signed_request variable to get the Facebook Page ID, which they then link together with the data in the database.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/signed_request/
You're allowed 2 tabs on a single page on their free account. But you can only add an app once. This implies they've either created a number of apps that are exactly the same(11 would be my guess as that's how many tabs their best plan offers) There used to be a way to do it using one of the old SDKS but as far as I was aware it was deprecated and is no longer available.
The fact that you say you can customise the tab image though, does imply that they're creating new apps, as far as I am aware you can only customise the image within the app settings in the developer app.
After a bit of investigation, this post may have more info
http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/6264080/create-a-facebook-application-programmatically
So I've been having a cordial debate with my coworkers (developers and designers) about the autofill tools for web forms. This is an important development question as it affects how forms might be built.
Q) What is the adoption of autofill tools, such as Google Toolbar or Chrome's built in feature?
Q) What are the most popular autofill tools?
Discussion appreciated. First answer with a reputable study gets the award.
Personally, I do not like auto-fill tools, and toolbars for that matter. Aside from the loss of screen real estate, there's too much bloat that comes with them. Also, with the way browsers versions are increasing, auto form fill applications are sometimes not supported in newer, more modern browsers.
I've worked in Government, Law enforcement, health care, and other public and private institutions and I have yet to see a good working form autofill tool, and if I did find a good one I can grantee that someone will be calling tech support because they submitted X amount of items with the exact same data.
HTML Forms can be built many ways, and forcing someone to build it a specific way is going to limit people, thus a form should be able to be built however someone wants, hopefully following W3C standards.
That being said, the most intuitive ones are those built into an application - where the developers/BA's create the auto-fill rules based on business cases and the correct algorithms, where users can define specific fields and parameters for data in those fields. Forcing an application to be built to match a 3rd party auto fill tool, which could change at any moment, or not be supported in the future, seems risky, I hear bells.
Update:
As far as revenue concerns, or a revenue stream for such a venture, you have to have an insight on the types of users that would use this software.
A form filler needs to be more than a generic: "This is a login page, let's put a username / password in". or a contact page "This is the previous data you used for a contact me page, fill it in".
A previous system I developed was an Action Item tracking system, with build in workflow / document management. Users asked for an auto fill for these items, which on the first request seemed utterly insane (demented is the word I wanted to say, but my manager helped me keep it bottled up). How would an auto-fill utility know exactly what to fill - but as I talked to the customer they expressed the following, which is valid for all autofill tools:
When I enter in a value say "Jane Smith" for "assign this task to", it would be nice if your system would automatically put "In Progress" for the item, as I always select "In Progress" as the status for this user.
As well, this worked for other users and fields as well. There was a specific flow on how this user entered data. "Jane Smith" items were always set to a specific department, status, and if the Item Type was say "correspondence" the Estimated Time was always 8 hours.
That type of auto-fill is what we custom made for them, and they payed well for it because it saved them a lot of time, mouse movements etc. AutoFill the way it is now is annoying at best for some people. But it's the pattern of the data that matters. It has to be intuitive and learn.
Once we developed this (it was easier because it was our application, we knew what was going on), about 90% of our customers jumped on board in the first week because of the time savings, sanity savings, and they didn't need to do ANYTHING to set it up - which was key.
I'm nearing the completion of migrating our existing website to a CMS and I've just finished creating all the various contact forms. The CMS I'm using has CAPTCHA built into it's form builder, which is great, but the only method available is the "decipher-the-noisy-image" method.
This approach works well, but it limits access for people who might have reading or sight disabilities. I've worked around this by having a "help" page which allows those with disabilities to contact us by telephone and I'm considering having a single-field form which says "Send us your email address and we'll contact you". Accessibility is of particular importance to me as a web developer, but from an organisational perspective; so is reducing the amount of form spam we receive.
So what I'd like to know is, has anyone in the community had any experience with other CAPTCHA methods and how have you managed to make them accessible to people with disabilities?
As a blind person I find that recaptcha is one of the better CAPTCHA services out there as far as an audio option. The issue with using sms as the only alternative is the fact that many visually impaired users don't have cell phones that allow them to read text messages.
A good captcha, like reCAPTCHA, usually includes an audio CAPTCHA. Also I have seen a site that will
send a SMS message and you enter the code in the sms (Google-gmail will do this).
I am very interested in this because I am implementing a CAPTCHA in jQuery right now.
Many sites, including this one I believe, have an option to play noisy audio with embedded spoken numbers, as an audio equivalent to the traditional CAPTCHA image.
I find the result pretty spooky, actually. Reminds me of numbers stations.
As Michael said, audio with each character of the CAPTCHA text spoken for better or worse is a common option provided. If your CMS is PHP-based or if PHP is available on the hosting infrastructure you are using anyway, here's an open source CAPTCHA application with an audio download option:
http://www.phpcaptcha.org/
I've implemented a production site with phpcaptcha, and it works as advertised.