MobiOne Studio 2.1.2 Release Notes

MobiOne Studio 2.1.2 is a maintenance release consisting of enhancements and key bug fixes.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

21279
Design Center
Use F2 to focus editing of widget id in Outline View
21697
Design Center
Improved color dialog and Font dialog position
21763
Code Gen
Back button active color supported for SelectListMenu navbar
21995
Design Center
Warn user - Android webview does not support resources with spaces or non-ascii chars in filename or path
22033
Widget
Map widget now displays correctly on multi-screen apps
22034
App Builder
Eliminated flash between end of splash display & start of iOS app
22035
Widget
Audio player stops playback on screen transition to new screen, i.e., no background audio
22038
Designer
Able to delete files from Additional Files Property dialog
22055
Test Center
Fixed JS Debugger segfault
22068
Design Center
Improved memory mgmt of custom media palette for large set of icons
22070
Code Gen
Fixed layout problem with widgets being unexpectedly hidden
22071
Code Gen
Code generation for HTML widget uses the widget ID
22076
Code Gen
Fixed alignment problem in toolbar layout algorithm
22090
Widget
Map widget will render white background when no location property set
22096
Designer
Help button for action property opens desktop browser to online documentation

1.1 Highlights

Following are the key improvements available in MobiOne 2.1. See the Highlights Showcase for more details and screenshots of these features.

See Section 3.3 below for more details about App Center.


View previous release notes
    2.1/2.1.1 release notes (merged)
    2.0.3 release notes
    2.0.0 release notes

2. Downloading and Installing

2.1 System Requirements

Operating Systems - Windows Only
Windows 7 (32/64 bit)
Windows Vista (32 bit)
Windows XP (32 bit)

Minimum Hardware
Pentium 500 MHz or greater
1 GB RAM or greater
300 MB hard disk free space
Display resolution: 1280x960 or greater recommended

2.2 Installation

Genuitec provides a Windows installer based on Genuitec’s OneInstall technology.

Recommend uninstalling former versions of MobiOne 
While the MobiOne installer is capable of upgrading existing MobiOne installations, we recommend that you uninstall any former version before running the MobiOne installer.

3. Special Notes and Changes

3.0.1 Documentation

For the latest MobiOne user documentation and FAQ, visit our online documentation at genuitec.com/mobione/learningcenter.html.

3.1 Design Center

3.1.1 Designing for Landscape Orientation and Better Layout on Other Devices

When laying out a user interface that must render well on multiple devices or in both landscape and portrait orientations, we recommend you place all widgets that must adjust their size or location to the form factor into a panel widget. Use the Auto-Resize layout properties to configure how each widget will be positioned and sized for the current display. Also you might need to enable the containing panel's vertical scrollbar so no content is clipped when the user interface is rendered on a display shorter than the form size for which the user interface was originally created.

Note: List, Rounded List, and SelectLists do not support vertical auto-resize properties

Note: You can not enable fixed left and right margins when a component's width is fixed. A similar restriction applies to fixed top and bottom margins for components with fixed height. This applies to toggle and checkbox components.

3.1.2 In-line Text Editing Renders at 100% Scale

The in-line text editing mode renders text at 100% scale regardless of the Visual Designer’s current scale. This may result in text appearing slightly misaligned at times during editing.

3.1.3 Round-trip Design to Code - Not Supported Yet

MobiOne does not keep designs and their corresponding HTML synchronized. Therefore, if you export a design as HTML and then edit the HTML layout files and repeat this process, the former HTML files can be overwritten. To support customization of generated code, MobiOne generates a customizable JavaScript file named after the source design file. You can modify this file without concern that future code-generation will overwrite it.

Example: For the design file, Foo.mobi the file Foo_custom.js is generated once and never regenerated.

We are working to increasingly improve your ability to customize MobiOne generated HTML and CSS layout code in a manner that future design exports will not overwrite.

3.1.4 Undo/Redo Issues

The Undo and Redo edit commands do not function correctly in all scenarios. Redo is a little sketchy, and in some contexts is inoperable.

3.1.5 Design Components Must Have Unique IDs

For HTML generation to function correctly, each component in a design must have a unique ID. During the export process, ID conflicts are automatically resolved to enable the resulting application to render properly in the Test Center and on iOS devices. The ID conflict resolution process prepends a simple prefix to all IDs.

3.1.6 Media Icon Redistribution

The Media palette includes almost 60 icons for use within your design. When a design containing any of the preinstalled media is exported as HTML, its images are included in the generated source code. You are free to redistribute these icons as part of the original design, as a design template or as a derivative of that design. The icons are not provided for general reuse and redistribution outside of the MobiOne design and development process.

3.1.7 Platform Specific UI Themes - iOS Only

At this time, only iOS themed widgets are provided. We plan to provide additional themes in a future release.

3.1.8 Designing for Android Screen Sizes and Densities

There is a wide range of devices that Android operates upon. The 2.0 version does not provide screen density settings. We plan to provide screen density settings for a future release.

3.1.9 Screen Transition Strategy to Deal with Quirks on Different Android Versions and Devices

Quirky animated screen transitions is a well-known issue across the 4 major versions of Android. Due to extremely poor performance on Android version 1 and 3, only the Fade transition performs respectably. Thus, all screen transitions are implemented as a Fade transition on Android 1 and 3. Additionally, due to a WebKit bug, the Flip Left and Flip Right transitions are mapped to the Fade transition on Android versions 2 and 4.

3.1.10 Jumpy Virtual Keyboard on Input-Field, Password and TextArea Widgets

On some devices the screen jumps up and down when typing text into Input Field, Password or TextArea widgets that are positioned near the bottom of a screen.

3.1.11 Video Player fails on iPad1 (iOS 4)

The video widget does not operate correctly on iPad1 (iOS 4) in our test lab. The video player will start in full-screen mode but when stopped the "Done" button will not return to its parent app. We are continuing to investigate this issue.

3.1.12 Audio Player causes UI flashing on iPad1 (iOS 4)

Apps that include an audio widget experience a screen flashes when run on iPad1 (iOS 4) devices. An initial screen flash appears when the audio play operation is activated. Thereafter screen transitions include a brief flash. This problem has not been replicated on iPad2/iPad3 (iOS 5) or iPhone 4/S (iOS 4 & 5) devices.

3.1.13 HTML widget custom code must be valid

When using an HTML widget, the custom HTML code you provide to the widget must be valid HTML and all element IDs must be unique across the entire application user interface. The HTML widget does no validate the custom HTML code. Code validation is planned for a future version.

3.2 Test Center

3.2.1 Mobile Webapp Emulation Support - No Native Application Emulation Support

The Test Center emulator for the iOS and Android platforms is limited to emulation of mobile web features. Therefore, the emulator does not support installation and execution of native app binaries, e.g., .ipa and .apk files. You will receive a warning if you attempt to perform an over-the-air web installation of a native application. The background for the mobile web emulation scope is that the future of cross-platform mobile development is squarely concentrated towards the combination of HTML5 and hybrid application technologies. The Test Center emulator will evolve to support this emerging strategy.

3.2.2 No Video Playback Support

The Design Center's video widget support is limited to rendering the video player UI including poster image. Video playback support is not available at this time. Instead when user presses the player's play button a simulated full screen control is presented that includes a note that playback is not available.

3.2.3 iPhone Device Mode Does Not Support Scaling

The iPhone emulator mode provides only 100% scaling. More flexible scaling similar to the iPad mode is planned for a future release.

3.2.4 Default iPhone Web Page Scaling Not Available

The iPhone emulator does not automatically scale an unoptimized website to fit its viewport. We are developing a new viewport management and rendering model that more closely emulates that of the iPhone.

3.2.5 Mouse Events Generated

The iPhone emulator converts mouse events to touch and gesture events. Both the original mouse events and the corresponding touch events are dispatched to the DOM. This differs from actual iPhone and iTouch devices, which do not propagate mouse events to the DOM.

3.2.6 Can Not Rearrange Home Sceen (Springboard) Icons

You cannot yet rearrange home screen icons.

3.2.7 tel: and sms: URL Emulation

The emulator is unable to make telephone calls or send SMS message. When the emulator encounters a URL with the tel: or sms: schema, a pop-up window is presented with a simple mock message.

3.2.8 Emulated Alert Dialog

Due to a quirk in the Test Center emulator, the Design Center's Popup Alert action creates HTML code that renders a custom alert dialog in the Test Center emulator. The native JavaScript alert will appear when the user interface is rendered on an iOS device.

3.2.9 Panel with Scrolling Background Issue

There is a known WebKit bug that prevents Test Center or Mobile Safari from being able to clip a scrolling background of a panel with rounded corners. Thus, you should limit use of the new Panel property "Scroll background" to only panels that have square corners (i.e., 90 degree corners).

3.3 MobiOne App Center

3.3.1 MobiOne App Center

MobiOne App Center provides a quick and easy way to build, install and share native iOS applications and optimized mobile web applications.

3.3.2 iOS Versions Supported (iOS 4 & 5)

Apps created by App Center are compatible with iOS 4.X and 5.X.  iPhone 3.x OS compatibility is not supported at this time due to an instability in the Phonegap framework. We are researching this issue but have no timeline for if and when creation of iPhone 3 compatible apps will be available as Apple is reducing support for version 3 and earlier apps.

3.3.3 Security

App Center hosted apps and webapps are accessed using obscure semi-private URLs, e.g., http://gl1e4z.gl, provided by App Center. While such URLs are publicly accessible, the are difficult to guess. Additionally, iOS apps may be installed only on devices defined in the provision profile you provided during build configuration.

3.3.4 No iTunes App Store Submission

App Center does not provide automated services to assist with App Store submission of your iOS applications. We currently recommend use of www.appstoreuploader.com, a low cost provider of App Store submission services.

3.3.5 PhoneGap/Apache Cordova Framework - NO EMULATION OR TECH SUPPORT in 2.0

MobiOne native apps are built using the open source PhoneGap 1.1 framework. Ownership of this framework has been transferred from Nitobi to the Apache Foundation where it has been renamed the Cordova project. This 2.0 release is concentrated toward providing the services to create Android and iOS applications from your MobiOne generated webapps. Therefore, Genuitec will not provide Test Center emulation of PhoneGap/Cordova APIs and apps until a later release. You are free to use PhoneGap JavaScript APIs, but we will not provide technical support for PhoneGap API usage until it is supported by the Test Center emulator.

3.3.6 Hosting and Data Transfer Limits

The maximum total upload size of a project to App Center for either native application build or mobile webapp plublishing has been expanded to 50Mb.

3.3.7 Android Builder can not support Files containing non-Ascii & Special Chars

The Android App Builder Wizard can not process .mobi and image file names that contain of non-ascii characters or these +:/\#$&% special characters.


4. Known Issues

Design Center Issues
13227 Tab key not supported for component navigation
13236
Problems with tooltips on multi-monitor configuration
14349 EFS logs an Exception on start - no effect on MobiOne
14860
Press "del" btn while entering text in TextArea deletes component not text
15083 Designer becomes very slow when moving several components
14305 HTML for Image buttons & tab bar buttons does not provide select feedback
16214
Making small button causes its title to shrink while exported
17925 Faceplate image in very large or small "Fit window" scale could use improvement
18100 When scale != 100% selected component outline is rendered misaligned on bottom and right
18156 In some cases, scrolled panel does not clip content that extends outside of its viewport, e.g., long text
18363
Undo not available for alignment operations
18364
Rounded corner panel does not clip scrolling image background (see #17052)
18519
Text formatting does not match iPhone rendering in some cases due to diff between Windows font metrics and iOS font metrics
20943
Jumpy editing of InputField, Password & TextArea positioned near bottom of screen



  

General/App Center/Update Issues
N/A MobiOne can not install into path with non-ascii chars
N/A Can not install into read-only privileged directory, e.g., c:\Program Files on Win7 & Vista
N/A NTLM proxy not supported
N/A Update Test Center proxy settings requires MobiOne restart
N/A Duplicate proxy authentication required when update system starts after Test Center emulator
20872 Android App Builder does not support files with non-ascii names
21810 Video player poster image scales to fill video player at runtime. Image may be distorted.

 
Test Center Issues

10871 iPhone meta tags for user scale/zoom/viewport are not supported (yet)
10872 Popup windows are not support
10098 Viewport indicators are not visible during mousewheel scrolling
11020 Inaccurate font sizing on some sites
11116 Odd "try{__injected}catch(e){}" in debugger
11784 iPhone 2.2 should not have access to geolocation API of iPhone 3
11811 No support for 3D CSS
11914 No prompt shown to user to ask permission to let html app access geolocation
12307 All mouse events still fired on touch/gesture events
14376 Close dirty editor does not warn to save contents
15377
JQtouch swipe event not processed correctly
16409
Ctrl+PrnScn causes controls to disappear rather than print the screen
17052
Rounded corner panel does not clip panel contents - WebKit bug
18572
Spinner control does not automatically close on page transition or form submit
20987 Mouse-wheel scrolling clips view in Android devices
21052 No settings to customize Android personalities background
21055 Android Nexus S homescreen emulation should not rotate when in landscape orientation
N/A
Native kinetic scrolling (flick scrolling) not available
N/A
Flash is enabled when N/A on iOS devices
N/A
Some proxy settings not supported such as NTLM proxies
N/A
UI does not refresh correctly when overlapped by other app window that is moved
N/A
UI corrupt layout when moving app window over Test Center repeatedly, e.g., Exchange
N/A
Emulator browser does not report cross-domain access violations - use Local Web Server to resolve
N/A
No emulation of PhoneGap/Cordova SDK and API
N/A No <video> tag emulation - only static UI emulation of the Designer Center video player


5. Contact Us

We welcome your feedback. Please share with us your opinions on what we are doing right and areas for improvement on the MobiOne Feedback forum.