Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

File Under: HTML5, Mobile, Web Standards
Sep
21
2012

New HTML Tricks for Web Developers in Apple’s iOS 6

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Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Apple’s recent iOS 6 update added some nice new web standards support to Mobile Safari, the default iOS web browser for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Apple’s documentation remains sparse and occasionally outdated, but luckily Max Firtman, author of O’Reilly’s Programming the Mobile Web, has a very thorough rundown of everything that’s new in iOS for web developers.

By far the biggest news is support for file uploads and camera access using a combination of the File API and the HTML Media Capture API. To let users take a picture from your web app, you’d use a file input tag something like this:

<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="camera">

Mobile Safari’s Media Capture support is incomplete so it will ignore the capture attribute, as well as any value for accept other than image or video, but at least web apps can now capture and upload images from the iPhone’s camera.

I put together a quick demo page of Mobile Safari’s Media Capture support so you can see the new interface in action. The first two examples on that page work, the third audio example does not. You can see in the demo that Mobile Safari helpfully shows a thumbnail of the image prior to upload. It’s also worth noting that Mobile Safari supports the multiple boolean flag for uploading more than one image at a time, though in that case you lose the ability to access the camera.

For more on what to do with those images once the user has selected them, check out the Mozilla developer network, which has an excellent tutorial on using the File API.

Other highlights for web developers in the new Mobile Safari include support for the Web Audio API (great news for anyone building mobile, web-based games), increased application cache sizes (now 25MB), a faster JavaScript engine and some new CSS tricks as well — CSS Filters, CSS Cross Fades and the not-yet-a-standard CSS Image Set we told you about earlier. Be sure to read through Firtman’s whole post for all the details.

While there’s plenty to like about the new Mobile Safari there are some things missing, like support for WebRTC and getUserMedia, WebGL and sadly our least favorite bug — the Viewport Scaling Bug, which causes Mobile Safari to incorrectly reflow content when rotating from portrait to landscape — seems to still be hanging around. As always there’s a JavaScript workaround available.

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Sep
20
2012

New Opera Mini 7.5 Introduces ‘Smart Page’

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Webmonkey is in your Opera Mini Smart Page, making you smarter. Image: Webmonkey.

Opera software has released Opera Mini 7.5 for Android.

To update or install Opera Mini on your Android device, head on over to m.opera.com or Google Play.

The latest version of Opera’s lightweight, speedy mobile browser — not to be confused with the much more full-featured Opera Mobile — adds a new feature, the “Smart Page,” for what Opera calls “social snacks.”

The new Smart Page is a social media and news aggregator, offering one-stop access to your friends’ updates from Facebook or Twitter, as well as news from the websites you visit most frequently.

Because Opera Mini proxies your internet connection through Opera’s servers, making page downloads considerably smaller and faster, the company can use the sites you’ve visited to compile what amounts to ad hoc feeds for your most visited sites. As with all things automated, the more you use Opera Mini the better your news results will be.

Opera Mini is also available for iOS and other platforms, but so far this latest version is only available on Android. An Opera spokesperson declined to comment on when other Opera Mini releases might be updated.

To see the new Smart Page feature in action, check out this video:

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Aug
28
2012

Firefox for Android Goes Tablet-Native

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Firefox for Android. Image: Scott Gilbertson/Webmonkey

The latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser for Android devices is now available in the Google Play Store.

This release continues Mozilla’s move away from the unified Firefox look to one that uses native Android interface elements.

The new native interface for Android tablets means faster start-up times and a much speedier Awesome Bar for searching, but it also means the browser is a bit more Android-y and a bit less Firefox-y. For most Firefox fans that’s probably just fine; the significant speed boost more than makes up for the fact that the mobile version looks a bit different than desktop Firefox.

The latest Firefox for Android packs in some other welcome new features as well, including the ability to import bookmarks and browsing history from Android’s stock web browser, a new setting to clear specific types of private data and a much-needed new “find in page” search tool.

This release also includes much of the new web standards support found in Firefox for Android’s desktop cousin, also released today, which means that CSS word-break and other new features will work on mobile devices as well.

For a complete list of new features in Firefox for Android, be sure to check out the full release notes. And while Firefox for Android has been pretty stable in my testing, there are still some known issues, including one bug that occasionally causes the screen to go wonky (“yield unexpected behavior,” in Mozilla’s words) when changing from portrait to landscape and vice versa.

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File Under: Mobile, Multimedia
Aug
15
2012

Adobe Pulls Flash for Android From Google Play Store

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Jelly Bean kicks the Flash habit. Image: Google

Today’s the day Adobe will pull its Flash Player plugin from Google’s Android marketplace, marking the end of what was once touted as a key advantage of Android over Apple’s iOS.

As we reported earlier, Google’s new Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” marks the end of the line for Adobe’s certified version of mobile Flash Player. While the move shouldn’t have been a huge surprise since Adobe already announced last year that it would cease development of its mobile Flash Player, it’s still bad news for those that wanted an official version of the Flash Player on a Jelly Bean phone.

And now Adobe has limited access to Flash in the Google Play Store to any phone on this list of certified devices. For everyone else Flash on Android is a thing of the past.

The reasoning behind Adobe’s decision to pull Flash from the Google Play store is that any devices that don’t have Flash Player installed out of the box are, in Adobe’s words, “increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player.”

There is a way around the new limitations if you’re a developer who needs access to Flash (or, presumably, a user who doesn’t mind hacking your phone): Flash Player for Android will remain available in Adobe’s archive of released Flash Player versions. It’s also worth noting that when we first wrote about the end of Flash on Google Play a number of readers let us know that the Flash plugin actually does seem to work with Android 4.1, so if you’ve just got to have it, head to the archives and give it a shot.

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File Under: Mobile, Multimedia
Jun
29
2012

Adobe: No Flash for You, Android 4.1

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No Flashing the Jelly Bean. Image: Google

The bells tolling the death of Adobe Flash got a bit louder this week.

To go along with the arrival of Google’s new Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” update, Adobe has announced that it will not be developing a certified version of Flash for Android 4.1. Worse for Flash fans, Adobe says it will soon be pulling Flash Player from the Google Play Store.

The move shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Adobe already announced last year that it would cease development of its mobile Flash Player. Still, if you were hoping Google might give Flash a bit of a reprieve by including support in the latest version of Android, well, we’ve got bad news for you.

Beginning Aug. 15, Adobe plans to start limiting access to Flash in the Google Play Store to mobile devices that already have Flash installed. In other words, if your Android phone shipped with Flash installed — what Adobe refers to as a “certified version” of mobile Flash — then you can keep getting updates through the Google Play Store. If you’re planning to buy a new phone running Android 4.1, you won’t be installing Flash after the fact.

The reasoning behind the move is that any devices that don’t have Flash Player installed out of the box are, in Adobe’s words, “increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store.”

There is a way around the new limitations if you’re a developer who needs access to Flash (or, presumably, a user who doesn’t mind hacking your phone): Flash Player for Android will remain available in Adobe’s archive of released Flash Player versions. Also, little birds flying around Google I/O this week tell us that the Flash plugin actually does seem to work with Android 4.1. If you’d like to try it for yourself, better hurry up and grab it while you can.

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