I've read that since user agent is the same between both, the recommend method is to use feature detection. That is fine and good for some situations, where you may want to display a Flash video/movie/app vs. a javascript slideshow, but my issue is to display a correct interface based on the user's input device.
The assumption I'm making is that if a user is in the "Metro" IE10 they are probably expecting to use their fingers instead of a mouse. That being the case, I'd like to give them an interface with large hit boxes.
My question: Is there a way to tell the difference and display an appropriate interface? Or am I stuck with making the user manually switch modes via links on my site that set a cookie?
Still there's no way to detect normal IE from the crippled Metro IE, but know you can know at the server if the user has a touch screen http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/07/12/ie10-user-agent-string-update.aspx
That post includes other comments about how to perform detection in javascript.
If you use the msPointerPoint interfaces, your client will receive the same messages whether they're using the mouse or touch. You can also use the gestures api - there was just a blog post on the IE blog which discusses how to use gestures from the mouse browser.
IE exposes a unified stack for messages so you can use the same input processing and your UI will work whether you're using touch/pen or mouse.
Related
My requirement is, I have an app that is running in the background and is not having the focus. The user might be using some other applications, and based on certain events in my app, I want the screen reader to announce the text based on my liking. I dont want my app to get the focus, user should be able to continue with the other application, I just want screen reader to announce some texts. I already tried sending QAccessibleEvent with different Events like Alert, NameChanged, ObjectShow etc. But I think since my app is not in focus, it may not be passing through. Could it be possible to achieve my requirement without my app getting focus? Thank you. I am using Qt 5.15 with Windows 10
One possible solution is to directly call screen reader specific API.
However, if you are presenting some text on screen as well, you should rather preferably use the so called toasts, or the notification system, if it's suited to your application.
QT probably provides access to them.
Just in case, I'm the author of a DLL that allows to make several screen readers speak text.
Note that it doesn't show anything on screen.
http://github.com/qtnc/UniversalSpeech
Well, the title almost says it all : Why should I not move a GUI (e.g. Gtk) window on screen from the code ? In Gtk 3 there was an API for moving windows on screen, but it was removed in Gtk 4, because it is not good to move a window from code; only the user should do so (don't ask me to provide sources for that, I read it somewhere but have forgotten where and cannot find it). But I cannot think of any reason why it shouldn't be good, but of several reasons why it could be good, for example to restore the position of a window between application restarts. Could you please shed some light on this ?
The major reason why is that it can't possibly work cross-platform, so it is broken API by definition. That’s also why it was removed in GTK4. For example: this is impossible to implement when running on top of a Wayland session, since the protocol doesn't allow getting/setting global coordinates. If you still want to have something similar working, you'll have to call the specific platform API (for example, X11) for those platforms that you want to support.
On the reason why it’s not supported by some display protocols: it’s bad for UX and security. In terms of UX: some compositors can have special behavior because they need to work on a small device, or because they have a kiosk mode in which everything should always run fullscreen, or they provide a tiling experience. Applications positioning their windows themselves then tend to give unexpected behaviour. In terms of security: if you allow this, it’s technically possible for an application to reposition and resize itself so that it covers your screens while making itself transparent, without it being noticeable, which means it has the possibility of scraping all input.
We have a need in our app where the user will get turn by turn navigation to a location then need the ability to tell the app, "hey I'm here, don't need the turn by turn anymore."
Obviously I'm trying to stay cross platform. I tried this control which extends on Forms.Maps:
https://github.com/TorbenK/TK.CustomMap
It's closer, but it doesn't do actual turn by turn, it draws a path between 2 pins then exposes a list of instructions with no location tracking, so it won't fit the requirement.
Then I found the openuri method here:
https://developer.xamarin.com/recipes/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/maps/map-navigation/
That works GREAT. The only issue is the application completely disappears. I get this is expected behavior from openuri, but I can't find any other way to get the full on turn by turn guided navigation. Is anyone aware of any way I could use guided navigation and expose a button, or anything really, like a button that says "Dismiss Map" and returns to the application? I'm open to other suggestions as well.
Thanks.
WP7 mango now supports background agents (with some limitations): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/danielegan/archive/2011/10/18/background-agents-in-wp7.aspx
How can I inspect the user's current activity? specifically, here is what i'd like to determine:
what is the active application
when was the last user interaction
I think the Microsoft way of doing this would be to provide developers with an API to modify Lock Screen system settings. This is not possible at the moment, but there is a petition to enable setting the wallpaper from an app here: http://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-app-platform/suggestions/1720049-provide-a-wallpaper-api-to-enable-in-app-setting-o?ref=title
This combined with the ability to change the screen timeout (not possible yet) would achieve the desired effect.
I take it you are probably after custom screensaver with some other information on it and/or rendered/animated content. This wouldn't make sense. The whole point of the screen saver is to save the screen.
There is no better way to save the screen than to turn it off, which mobile devices handle pretty well.
You can't do either. Windows Phone does not support inspecting the users activity or anything else that goes beyond the boundary of a 3rd party application's own domain.
The background agents are limited to the application that created them, and the data related to that (in it's isolated storage).
And this is a good thing, since it means creating mal- and spyware is a lot more difficult. Also, a application like you're attempting to make, would principally be considered spyware.
I am new to windows phone (WP7) and to me it looks like everything on WP7 is about pages. I want a small window to pop up from the bottom of a page while staying on the same page. The small window will have some controls (like slider, list etc.). It should not behave like a modal dialog box though, i.e. the rest of the page (which is not covered by the small window) should still be active and user should be able to do something there. And I want to have a separate C# class which will handle the events from the controls on the small window.
This is very easy on iPhone, using view controllers, is there something similar on windows phone?
It sounds that it would make sense to make your "pop up" part of the page with the content it is intended to manipulate content on that page. If you want to encapsulate the functionality of the "pop up" you could make it a UserControl. If you went this route then animating it to slide onto the screen will be straightforward.
Windows Phone 7 typically uses an MVVM model compared to iPhone's MVC one for app structure. The direct comparison therefore isn't appropriate. WP7 also uses a very different design language to that of the iPhone and so a straight port of application design and layout is also unlikely to create a great experience on WP7.
I'd recommend taking some time to understanding the differences in the platforms and how your existing design would be best suited to recreation on WP7. Not only will this help you create a better experience on WP7 but enable to see if this your question actually relates to something you should be doing or not.
This very much sounds like something that goes against the nature of the platform, and the general design guidelines.
If you're providing some available configuration options to the user, you should do it on a separate page, so the user can change the settings there, approve it, and then be navigated back to the previous page.
However, if you really want to, you're talking about displaying a UserControl inside a Popup. But it wouldn't be a very good user experience, and confuse most users, as it doesn't follow the same look&feel as the rest of the platform.