[AlanQuestell]

What features or services does Mobione provide in addition to the mobile products provided through MyEclipse Pro?

[support-michael]

Hi,

MobiOne is Genuitec’s initial mobile product. Its focus is on rapid development of mobile prototypes and small to medium size mobile apps and webapps – no server side tools such as DB or web service development tools. We are currently enhancing MobiOne now with a better programming model and web programming tools (editors).

MyEclipse Mobile Tools overlap with MobiOne with a focus on professional developers and development of the full spectrum of apps from prototypes to enterprise class. MobiOne is optimized around a proprietary set of HTML5 widgets that we developed prior to emergence of open source widgets such as JQuery Mobile. MyEclipse has the benefit of being open and extensible to work with any HTML5 widget library and web components you choose. JQuery Mobile app templates and visual widget wizards are provided in the latest version of MyEclipse (SR2).

Having said this, MyEclipse’s visual programming support is not yet as advanced as that of MobiOne but it is closing fast. Both MyEclipse and MobiOne provide cloud based app build tools which are convenient when you don’t have the required hardware (mac for iOS app builds) or mobile sdks installed on your local workstation. Later this year MyEclipse will be updated to include both local and cloud app build capabilities.

I hope this is helpful in making your decision on which product best fits your needs.

[AlanQuestell]

Yes, thanks so much.

[SonamGyato]

I received one of the free licenses…thanks.

Before I start out- like to make sure of coupla things.

1. I can develop using Javascript/html5 – i.e. leverage much
of my app logic code from mobione.

2. can create webapps for ios7.

3. will be much more compatible than mobi.

Thanks.

[support-michael]

Let me start by saying MobiOne and MyEclipse is not an apples-apples comparison. Moving to MyEclipse you will not have access to MobiOne visual design tools. Thus you are either starting over to create a new version of your app with a new UI framework/widgets such as JQuery Mobile or you are freezing your mobione UI, importing its code into MyEclipse and making mostly functional changes at the javascript level.

>Before I start out- like to make sure of coupla things.
>1. I can develop using Javascript/html5 – i.e. leverage much of my app logic code from mobione.

Yes

>2. can create webapps for ios7.

Yes, this is possible using the MyEclipse HTML5 App Project and wizards to set it up. A webapp is basically a subset of the HTML5 App Project. You would work only on the /www content of the project. Something to pay attention to are the meta-tags. MobiOne insulates you from all these coding details which you are responsible for in coding-centric IDEs such as MyEclipse.

> 3. will be much more compatible than mobi.

Your mileage will vary based on the technology and implementation you choose for your MyEclipse mobile project. I can’t say because MyEclipse works with the UI frameworks you choose. Thus device compatibility concerns are between you and the UI framework vendor, not the IDE tools which pulls them together and builds your project.

The only problem with iOS 7 specific to MobiOne is the UI layout engine in mobile safari (std mode) which we are working to address.

[SonamGyato]

Wayne,

Thanks…I guess I’ll give it a try.

Does the product come with some ui-frameworks.

Are there some samples out there.

The critical feature I need is that it needs to be a true
webapp – served from my server – not the app store.

Thanks.

[support-michael]

>Does the product come with some ui-frameworks.

jquery mobile

>Are there some samples out there.

jquery mobile is well documented and there are many examples. Also MyEclipse includes project and JQM widget templates to help you get started quickly.

> I need is that it needs to be a true webapp – served from my server – not the app store.

Clear, this is possible.

[SonamGyato]

Before I invest too much time in an alternate solution…

Can someone explain why Eclipse Pro w/ jQuery mobile will
work where Mobi is failing (i.e. for ios7). Full screen webapps.

Wayne, from your explanation jQuery is javascript also – so
just wondering how that gets around the recent ios7 changes.

[support-michael]

>Can someone explain why Eclipse Pro w/ jQuery mobile will work where Mobi is failing (i.e. for ios7). Full screen webapps

This issue is not specific to MobiOne. At this time there is no solution from ANY product for full screen webapps on iOS 7.0 due to iOS 7 Mobile Safari bugs.

Where jQuery Mobile (JQM) differs from MobiOne UI layout is the component layout strategy. JQM is less sensitive to display area size. And while you can control the precise positioning and sizing of JQM components you typically don’t. You leave it to the browser’s html layout algorithm (left-right, top-bottom). MobiOne on the other hand strives to honor the layout of your visual design in component positioning and scaling. Thus it is explicitly sensitive to the size of the display area. This type of html layout is more common in games and strictly positioned UIs. MobiOne’s layout algorithm must be able to identify when the display area dimensions change (e.g., device rotation, show/hide browser address and nav bars).

Checkout the article that I referenced earlier today that calls out how iOS7 safari does not (yet) provide events to detect changes in address bar and nav bar visibility. Thus the MobiOne UI layout algo is not able to dynamically adjust for the dynamic bars of Mobile Safari.

Why would jQuery Mobile not work? Let me qualify this before someone chimes in and says they have a solution. Your mileage will vary with homescreen apps based on the features your webapp uses. For example, I can create a simple homescreen webapp that will run but you either have to know which features to avoid or just get lucky. There are issues with navigation history and appcache. Also some event processing appears bonked in the bottom 1/3 of the display. Finally let’s say you have a working webapp (from any dev tool src) and you save it to homescreen. Some bug in iOS7 randomly replaces existing webapps with a more recent version. In our testcases we saw this happen over and over where all webapps on the homescreen would randomly be replaced by 1 webapp – super weird when it happens.

I wish I had good news on this front. We will testing early betas of 7.0.1 as soon as they are available.

[SonamGyato]

Thanks Wayne.

I understand Mobi does not get the callback when Safari displays
the toolbars dynamically. how about mobi disable full-screen mode
and just assume the address bar and toolbar is always there – at least
for now. then the app should be full functional right?

Also I looked into why a BACK button and a HOME button when the
same functionality on one of my pages had a different behavior.
BACK does not work.

BACK calls history.go(-1) and HOME called transition slide-left.

so seems like ios7 has problems with the former. so i can change the
back to a transition and it should work of my particular app.

If what I suggested earlier and me doing the above was possible – then
my app would work about 90 percent – albeit non-fullscreen.

[Author]

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