Tag: Android

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Remote Debugging Samsung Galaxy 7 Edge with Chrome

If you’re confused as to why something which is working well on your Canvas site, isn’t working on the Student App, Google Chrome gives you a great way to find out what’s going wrong with its Remote Debugging Android Devices

Annoyingly, it’s not quite as easy as one would hope on a Galaxy S7 Edge or, by the sounds of it, any Samsung device, on Windows 10 anyway.

Extra steps required above what’s on the page above, for me anyway, were:

  1. Enabling USB Debugging. On A Galaxy S7, to turn developer mode on, you have to go to About phone | Software info then tap Build number 7 times(!?). You can then access the Developer options (at bottom of Settings) to switch on USB Debugging.
  2. On Windows 10, to even get the Device to be recognised, you need to:

If you have a Mac available, you don’t seem to need to bother with Step 2 above – it just works!

 

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Migrating Cordova/JQuery Mobile app from Android to iOS

Some notes on this process in case they are useful to others:

Back button

Android specifically prohibits back buttons due to the presence of a physical Back button on all Android mobiles. However, in iOS, it’s the norm. JQuery mobile does provide an easy to insert header back button :

<a href="#" data-role="button" data-rel="back" data-icon="arrow-l">Back</a>

but it uses the JQuery theme. If you want to make it look like an iOS back button, this article makes it relatively easy.

Navigation

In Android,with Cordova, we have to use absolute URLs for navigation:

navigator.app.loadUrl("file:///android_asset/www/mypage.html");

In iOS, we can use the much simpler form:

location.href = "mypage.html";

Seemingly random clicks firing intermittently

It seems that using JQuery Mobile’s ‘vclick’ event in iOS can cause problems, although the same code was working fine in Android. I was seeing a page change, followed by another page change as if something in the first page loaded had been clicked. After trying all sorts of event undelegation and unbinding, I finally looked at JQuery’s vclick documentation. This explains that there is a slight delay between the JQuery’s ‘vclick’ event  and the native ‘click’ event. When the content under the clicked point changes (as in this case with a new page load), the click event can actually fire on the changed rather than the original content. In situations like this, the recommendation is to use the ‘click’ rather than ‘vclick’ which solved the problem for me.

External pages

My app opens links to an external site for further information. In Android, simply specifying a full http:// prefix URL was enough to ensure that it loaded in the device’s normal web browser. In iOS, the default to seems to be to load it within the embedded brwoser which is being used to run your Cordova application, which is far from ideal. The workaround seems to simply add:

target = '_blank'

to all external links – they then fire up the iOS device’s Safari browser.