Share a "deep link" from a Windows 8/WinRT application - windows-8

I have searched using many different terms and phrases, and waded through many pages of results, but I have (remarkably) not seen anyone else addressing, even asking, about, this issue. So here goes...
Ultimate Goal: Allow a user viewing a content-based page (may contain both text and images) within a Windows Store app to share that content with someone else.
Description
I am working on taking a fair amount of content and making it available for browsing/navigating as a Windows 8/WinRT/Windows Store (we need a consistent name here) application. One of the desired features is to take advantage of the Share Charm, such that someone viewing a page could share that page with someone else.
The ideal behavior is for the application to implement the Share Source contract which would share an email message that contained some explanatory text, a link to get the app from the Windows Store, and a "deep link" into the shared page in the application.
Solutions Considered
We had originally looked at just generating a PDF representation of the page, but there are very few external libraries that would work under WinRT, and having to include externally licensed code would be problematic as well. Writing our own PDF generation code would out of scope.
We have also considered generating a Word document or PowerPoint slide using OpenXML, but again, we run up against the limitaions of WinRT. In this case, it is highly unlikely the OpenXML SDK is useable in a WinRT application.
Another thought was to pre-generate all of the pages as .pdf files, store them as resources, and when the Share Charm is invoked, share the .pdf file associated with the current page. The problem here is the application will have at least 150 content pages, and depending on how we break the content down, up to over 600. This would likely cause serious bloat.
Where We Are At
Thus we have come to sharing URIs. From what I can tell, though, the "deep linking" feature is only intended for use on Secondary Tiles tied to your application. Another avenue I considered was registering a protocol like, "my-special-app:" with the OS and having it fire up the application but that would require HKCR registry access, which is outside the WinRT sandbox.
If it matters, we are leaning towards an HTML/JS application, rather than XAML/C#, because the converted content will all be in HTML and the WebView control in WinRT is fairly limited. This decision is not yet final, though.
Conclusion
So, is this possible, and if so, how would it be done or where can I find documentation on it?
Thanks,
Dave Parker

Related

Render PDF in Xamarin Forms from a Stream

I have been searching the web however I have come up empty so felt the need to ask. We want to render a PDF file on iOS, Android and UWP through Xamarin Forms and the most important part, from a Stream.
I have come across answers like this however they just reinforce the notion of loading from a file or url.
We are not allowed to store the PDF files unencrypted on disk so the only 2 possible options I can see are to:
Find a viewer that can render from a Stream
Implement/expand a viewer that can render from a Stream
I haven't been able to find much based on these options so I am either hoping for someone to know of some framework or method of achieving this or at least some form of starting point library wise.
PDFTron PDFNet SDK is available for all the listed platforms, and Xamarin, and supports opening and viewing a PDF from a stream (no disk access required).
https://www.pdftron.com/pdf-sdk/xamarin-library
https://www.pdftron.com/documentation/xamarin/guides
While PDFTron was the only supplied answer I encountered great difficulty firstly getting any information from the company themselves in order to get costing information and secondly the trial downloads and samples wouldn't even compile.
I actually did some further research in to paid for solutions and found that SyncFusion offered a PDF viewer control that could also render from a Stream. They also provided answers to all my questions and got us up and running within less than a day.

Extract Font from PDF using GdPicture

According to their website (http://www.gdpicture.com/products/managed-pdf/) you have the ability to extract fonts from a PDF file. However, I can't seem to find the functionality to do this. I have encountered several methods to add them, but none to extract them (and they don't show as embedded files). Has anyone tried to do this, or have experience with GdPicture?
Version: 14 (Current)
Disclosure: I am part of the ORPALIS technical staff that edits the GdPicture.NET SDK, that's why I know there's an ongoing communication about this already.
It is my understanding that you have a support case open for a merging issue relative to fonts and as you know, our development team is currently working on a fix that will solve it so I strongly recommend that you wait for them to finish.
There's no extraction of the embedded font as you might expect at the moment but the development team is also working on one, we will let you know as soon as it is available (it should be very soon).
You can get information about (already) embedded fonts using the GetFontCount, IsFontEmbedded, GetFontName and GetFontType methods.
You can also add new embedded fonts (of different types) using the AddFontFromFileU, AddStandardFont, AddTrueTypeFont, AddTrueTypeFontFromFile, AddTrueTypeFontFromFileU and AddTrueTypeFontU methods.

Design studio for mockups and UX designer, iOS, process

I just got a new gig with a startup, they have a design studio that creates mock ups in photoshop and then sends them to me ( I am the UX designer ). Now they started talking to me about a process of defining how many pixels are needed for the dimensions of every png and jpeg and all the other mockups and installing photoshop on my machine, so I can figure out the dimensions when I open the psd files.
To me it sounds normal for the design studio to give me some assets and provide a file with every asset and its dimensions ( as in, this is an icon, size is (46x80), as opposed to me opening the asset in psd and figuring that out myself.
I was wondering what do other companies do? What is the process in place between the mock up design studio and the actual UX programmer who translates those assets into actual screens?
Thanks.
There is no "standard". It's generally best to let the designers provide individual files since they're the Photoshop experts and may be tweaking the images over time. You may have to provide them a list of files with descriptions, format, size, and variations (enabled, disabled, active). We ask for retina sizes and then have a tool to generate non-retina ones.
We like to use Google spreadsheets for the list of files and DropBox for the actual transfer.
Having said that, you should have Photoshop and learn to use it because there will be times where a graphic needs a tweak and you don't want to wait on someone else.
So who is actually designing the experience? Is it your job to code it? Or, are you the guy that is supposed to come up with the wireframes and then them do the visual design according to that?
With the company I work at (and in my freelance work) I'm rarely given the exact sizing of any assets, unless there's a specific requirement.
For the most part, when building a new site (or amending an existing one), I don't find out the sizes of anything until I open up Photoshop and start cropping.

Possible to create a custom interface, making use of files managed by Alfresco?

Our company's switching from traditional, lame Windows shared drive to a Linux install of Alfresco.
I'm the sole developer here (...go me!) and I would like to hear any thoughts on what I envisage being an interface, created by me, accessible by my team, and drawing on files stored in Alfresco, to modify some HTML files presented by the interface.
So, I would want to make use of file locking on HTML files loaded into my interface, and also the ability to save manipulated HTML files. Offering a version history via my interface would be a nicety, given that Alfresco itself can obviously be used to retrieve that data.
I saw WebDAV support, so I thought, "Hey! I could let my designers modify my pages, given team-decided boundaries!". It sure would beat Dreamweaver for this.
I should also probably mention that yes, we do have the ability to have our soon-to-be-installed Alfresco customised for my purposes, so if it is that this must happen, then any advice around that appreciated also.
Thanks for your thoughts, examples and the like.
The comment attached to this question is the answer I was after.

Add watermark to various documents investigation

I've been asked to investigate the feasibility of adding watermarks to documents when printed through our application. The documents will consist of word, pdf and cad.
The interface of the application is vb6 with a plethora of vc6 dll's.
I can see a couple of possible solutions:
Convert all documents to PDF, add a watermark and then print.
Find a print driver that will add a watermark to all documents prior to printing and install it and reenable it at runtime if it gets disabled for any reason.
3rd Party suites are possibility (we use Volo View Express for viewing CAD files) but since this application is nearing end-of-life we wouldn't want to spend too much on it.
Has anyone had any experience of the above? Any gotcha's that will bog me down?
Tracker Software has a good set of PDF api's that that will allow you to implement the solution you already have in mind. I've used their Image and PDF libraries quite a bit with a lot of success in both VB6 and .NET. Single user licenses are not expensive (depending on how you look at it I guess), and I've found support to be excellent as well.