I am creating an application, and I noticed that nowhere can i find text such as 'pin to start' to use for livetiles in my application (creating a secondary tile). I tried to send Microsoft's AppHub a support ticket, but I only received a response saying that I could not be helped with translations? I clearly stated the need to be standardized and uniform across my third party apps and default behavior, but this had no effect on the answer. My problem arises when I translate my applications using a resx translator tool and Bing for my translation service. Some words to not translate correctly, which is fine because I go back through to check and then attempt to do this manually, but phrases such as 'pin to start' which are so unique to the WP7 application list sometimes do not translate properly at all. I would like to be as close to Microsoft's default language translations as possible for supported display languages, but are there any resources which may help me out? Or am I left in the dust to try to figure these out myself?
There is a page Microsoft Terminology Collection where you can download sets of standard texts.
There is no document that will show you the localized versions of the system strings. For that, you will have to dig through OS files, and that implies that you will have access to the WP OS image. You have to rely on your own translation skills or simply switch languages on the phone to check specific strings.
Excuse a non-developer being forced to develop applications instead of administrating networks like I'm used to. This is a horrible post in many ways.
I'm developing an application which has reached the point of needing a GUI. However, I haven't done any GUI development ever before, so I feel the need to ask for help on this.
The application is your standard data collecting/management app, with all common widgets and stuff that every application is using. The problem is that I need the application to be able to display websites using an external browser of some sort, to pass a captcha on the site the application works against. The website guys haven't given me permission to circumvent the captcha in any way.
I know of GTK, QT, Tcl/Tk etc. None of these frameworks have struck me as easy to use. To be honest, I'd like to design the interface using drag-and-drop like I used to do in VB6 when I was a kid, although I get chills thinking about writing this thing in Basic.
I was thinking about Adobe Air, and to design the application in Flash/ActionScript. From what I've learned about Air, I should be able to do everything I want to do. And I do believe it has built in sqlite, right? Would it be considered more "simple" to develop the actual GUI using Flash than using one of the traditional frameworks? What pitfalls am I facing?
A few guidelines:
It only needs to run on Windows
I need to be able to work against a database. Currently using SQLite3.
Some sort of browser integration is crucial. A browser window of some sort needs to open up inside my interface, be directed by the application, and the application needs to be able to read some data from the site that is being used.
Any help with this would be great. This is a clear case where I have to rely on the experience of others to complete the project at all. I'm happy to provide more information if you need that to make a suggestion.
You can always try Titanium Framework, it was aquired by Appcelerator nor so much ago. http://www.appcelerator.com/
It actually puts a webkit browser in a window, so if you can design HTML and CSS you can use this framework.
I have created a .NET Windows Forms component that runs within IE via an <object /> tag and allows me to print to a thermal label printer directly from a web page using the Windows API's to bypass the driver and send raw commands.
This all works, but my customer is now asking for similar functionality from Firefox!
What I need to do is to be able to pass the name of the printer that I want to use (this is configured within the web application) and then pass a string that is to be sent directly to the printer without being intercepted by the driver translation. I can acheive all of this by gaining access to the following Win32 API's (as I currently do from my .NET component)...
OpenPrinter
StartDocPrinter
StartPagePrinter
WritePrinter
EndPagePrinter
EndDocPrinter
ClosePrinter
I have looked at the options, and as far as I can see the only path available is XPCOM. Can anybody advise me as to whether I have reached the right conclusion before I start down this path as it appears that there is a great deal of work involved in creating an XPCOM extension and I would hate to spend a lot of time on it only to find out that either ...
There is an easier way
XPCOM will not do what I want!
Thanks in advance.
BTW: I am not looking to enable the existing .NET component to work in Firefox, I believe that I will have to start from scratch and create a Firefox extension that can be used instead.
I'm in the design phase for a desktop-based application. Because of the nature of this particular application, I believe it would benefit greatly from a web-based approach (i.e., allowing a user to interface with the application through a browser running in kiosk mode) in order to leverage the simplicity of HTML/CSS/JS and the availability of many great JS interface plugins. Does taking this approach (rather than coding in a native or cross-platform graphics library) come with any gotchas?
Well, your access to the OS and other domains are going to be limited.
What about using something like Adobe AIR that lets you use HTML/CSS/JS and compile it into a proper desktop app?
Please look at http://www.terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/ - the library which was designed to create desktop GUI using html and css.
The main "gotcha" to doing a web GUI is that you are going to need to set up a web server of some kind. A gui app can be just a single executable. You allso (probably) will need some GCI coding to get information back from the user to your program. In general, it is liable to be a whole lot more work.
Balancing against that is the fact that any user networked to your webserver anywhere in the world using the OS and browser of their choice should be able to operate your program.
How can I use the browser as a UI for a desktop app? The ways I have come up with so far are...
Use all HTML/Javascript. Problem: Can't access filesystem or just about anything else.
Run a local webserver while the application is in use. Problem: How do I kill it when the user is done? My users are not technical enough to Ctrl+C.
Embed a browser component in a regular GUI. Problem: Embedded browser components tend to be glitchy at best. The support for Javascript/CSS is never as good as it is in a real browser.
...?
The ideal solution would work with any technology. I know there are options like writing Firefox extensions, but I want to have complete freedom in the backend technology and browser independence.
Please note that if you choose to run a local webserver, you're creating a security risk.
Any webpage running on the same machine that knows about your app can send requests to your server using Javascript, and you have no simple and reliable way of knowing what the request came from. (Don't trust the referer header)
Google Desktop, which uses a similar approach, has had several real-world vulnerabilities that allow any webpage to read any file on disk.
There are several ways to protect against this; I would recommend requiring each request to have a auth key which is randomly generated per-machine (and expires at some point), which you could put in the source for the actual pages. XHR protection would prevent malicious websites from reading the auth key, rendering them powerless.
If you are looking for a python Web Server with a Kill link, you could always check CherryPy.
import webbrowser
import cherrypy
import threading
class MyApp:
""" Sample request handler class. """
#cherrypy.expose
def index(self):
return """<html><head><title>An example application</title></head>
<body>
<h1>This is my sample application</h1>
Put the content here...
<hr>
Quit
</body></html>"""
#cherrypy.expose
def exit(self):
raise SystemExit(0)
class MyBGThread(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.start()
def run(self):
cherrypy.tree.mount(MyApp())
cherrypy.quickstart()
myThread = MyBGThread()
webbrowser.open("http://127.0.0.1:8080")
This code is based on the sample from the SingleClickAndRun on the cherrypy website:
http://tools.cherrypy.org/wiki/SingleClickAndRun
Note than in a normal WebApp you would probably use a templating engine and load templates from methods like main.
Something that would be nice would be to embbed a browser control in a gui window and close the server when the app exits.
For the security, you could possibly add an authentication scheme. There are a few that are supported by cherrypy, but you possibly could implement your own too, using tool modules.
I am looking to do the exact same thing (desktop app that uses an up to date HTML5 / CSS3 browser as the desktop app's GUI), only with Ruby (various reasons why I decided to work with Ruby). Its amazing the number of cross platform libraries people have come up with. But yet, few to no one, has done any work on trying to get a web browser to be a desktop app UI. Cross platform issue... well I won't say solved, but I will say several steps in the right direction taken.
To me this would be perfect with the new HTML5 / CSS3 standards coming out. I know it can be done with a web server running locally.
Another way might be like how the guys from “280 North” are doing what they do. They developed Objective-J (an extension of regular JavaScript that mimics how Objective-C extends regular C) and Cappuccino (the Objective-J equivalent of Objective-C’s Cocoa frame work on the MAC). They also developed “Atlas” which is 280 North’s version of Apple’s “Interface Builder” from Xcode, for their Objective-J and Cappuccino frameworks to build Internet Applications. Atlas is actually a Cappuccino web app running on your desktop as a desktop app. In this case they use the Narwhal… a cross platform, general purpose, JavaScript platform for developing JS apps outside of the browser (basically a specialized web server).
If any one can come up with an idea to make “Browser, direct connect to Desktop App” work without the need of a web server co-existing and still get to manipulate the local FS, I to would be very interested… Hmmm... Now that I think about it, I wonder if the new Google Chrome project “Native Client” can be used to do that. NaCL is much like Active X except you are not limited to a windows platform (but will be limited to the Google Chrome browser, at least for now). Only there is added security via Sandboxing, but you can manipulate the local FS… The more I think about it, the more I am beginning to suspect that it can be done.
Any thoughts?
In Windows, you could embed the IE ActiveX control, which uses the same rendering engine as IE. (That's a plus and a minus) You can set the ScriptObject property in your host code and access it in Javascript as window.external to do things that Javascript cannot do.
If you run a local webserver, you could have an exit link in the app that kills the websever.
You did not mention the OS you will need to target. But you might be able to create a program statared web server, then launced the default browser. Wait until the browser is terminated by the user and then shut down the web server.
So for example on windows you can use CreateProcess() to spawn the process
then MsgWaitForMultipleObjects() to wait until it is finished executing.
HTML Applications (HTA, for short) have been around for a while. You can read all about them here. They are basically HTML and Javascript with some extra options to create a window and with access to the local file system. They seem to be exactly what you want. It is Microsoft technology, so this will only work with IE on Windows systems. I've successfully used this as a front-end for a CD-ROM which was used to distribute software to first year students
Another option would be to use Adobe Air. I'm not all that familiar with the technology, but it seems to provide a framework to deploy web pages as desktop applications. I can't post a second link as a guest, but just google it and you'll find it soon enough.
Today, in 2023, you can simply use any installed web browser as GUI using the WebUI library.