The easiest way to make mobile and desktop apps.
An interesting question came up on the web board this week. Is it possible to have a control which appears on all the forms of the project? For example, could you have a navigation bar which appears at the top of all the forms of the project?
It turns out this is quite easy to do. Continue reading “How to make a control appear on all your forms:”
If your PhoneGap app accesses external websites, there is an important change you need to make to your configxml Project Property.
Make the the following lines are in your configxml:
<gap:plugin name="cordova-plugin-whitelist" source="npm" />
<allow-navigation href="*" />
<access origin="*" />
The change seems to be a result of PhoneGap switching to npm to store its plugins. Be sure to read this blog post for more information on the change.
Edited 05/18/2016: Added allow-navigation line. It’s recommended that the href argument be as specific as possible. More information here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cordova-plugin-whitelist
The PhoneGap team posted the following to their blog yesterday:
iOS 9 is not officially supported yet, and there are some known issues. The Cordova open-source project team is hard at work on Cordova iOS 4.0, which will include iOS 9 support. For loads of helpful Cordova iOS news, keep an eye on Shazron’s blog, as well as the Apache Cordova blog.
Some of the problems notes by users on the PhoneGap Build Support forum are:
In the meantime, PhoneGap advises using the latest version (if you don’t specify “phonegap-version” configxml, the latest version will always be used) and to use the npm plugins (see this blog post!)
PhoneGap Build is changing how they organize their plugins. You will need to make some changes to configxml in Project Properties as a result.
For each PhoneGap plugin you use, you need to add a line to configxml which declares the name of the plugin. PhoneGap Build can then add it to your app. These used to be saved in a folder on PhoneGap’s servers: they are now stored in an npm repository.
Continue reading “PhoneGap Build: npm plugins”
The easiest way to add a script or an image to your project is to drag it into the Project Explorer. It will then be included in your project and added to the manifest automatically. When you deploy your app, it will be included.
But what if you have a lot of scripts or images?
Continue reading “Including multiple scripts or images with your app”
There are two ways to handle users rotating their devices: prevent them from do so by using the orientation control or locking the screen, or make your app look good in both Portrait and Landscape.
One of the problems with making your app look good in both orientations was doing the layout for both in the Design Screen. AppStudio 5.1 solves that. Here’s how:
Continue reading “Design Screen Now Features Rotation”
When we came up with our implementation of EXE files, we realized it would be great if there was a mechanism for making system calls. Let’s see how this is done.
Continue reading “EXE Apps: Making system calls”
This is a guest post by long term NS BASIC user, Lee Church. He nails the reality of hosting services. When you are ready to deploy your app to the world, you’ll need one.
Some thoughts about hosting services and errors:
This is not a recipe for quality and good service.
If you’re new to this environment, understand that the hosting site is a critical part of the process and your app. The best app in the world will fail miserably on a hosting site not set up properly. If you are not familiar with Web issues and servers, find a friend or consultant to help. You cannot take the hosting site’s response to problems at face value.
Got a hosting service that has worked well for you? Let us know, and we’ll set up a list here.
Hosting Services
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Vertical and horizontal centering is hard. Here, from CommitStrip.com:
Here’s a good resource with suggestions on vertical and horizontal centering:
https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/
Let’s work through an example. Continue reading “Responsive Design: Centering a button vertically”
When designing an app for mobile devices, you need to consider what happens if the device is rotated. You can just put up a message asked the user to rotate back, or you can design your app so it looks good in both portrait and landscape modes.
AppStudio 5 introduced Responsive Web Design as a way to layout your forms. RWD is a design approach for making apps size themselves to varying sizes of screens.
In this blog post, we’ll use Responsive Design to handle rotation in a simple layout with three buttons. The techniques can be used for much more complex layouts, of course.
Continue reading “Responsive Design: Rotating Your Device”