I'm wondering if the WebKit browsers (Safari and/or Chrome) provide a method to generate or retrieve existing thumbnails for websites. If not, is there any way to generate these client-side? If even that is not possible, is there software or a particular API to generate thumbnails server-side?
Thanks!
To people from the future:
At the time of writing, this feature is only available in Safari 5.0+. You can get thumbnails from the Tabs API. Chrome doesn't have any similar features as far as I could find.
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I'm developing a netflix client on vb.net, and i need it to run silverlight and needed extensions that netflix requires to display the video stream.
how can i change webbrowser from default to another one that works with my needs, and what browser is that?
If you're looking for a different web rendering engine you should try the Gecko web engine. From my experience it is much faster than the traditional IE engine and more compatible with plugins and web content. The engine integrates well into VB.NET applications so using it in your program should work. The engine itself does stream videos from netflix if that's the intent. you can download this rendering engine just from searching it but for convinience I'll put a link to a site where you can find it here.
I was planning to port over my chrome extension Tab Resize to Opera. I'm using the chrome.system.display API to get the user's display information in order to support multi-screen setups.
I wanted to check if there were plans to support the display API. It's the only thing hindering me from porting over the extension.
Thanks,
Peter
We will implement the API in Opera 30.
I have posted some other smaller questions regarding the problem I describe below and got some feedback but now I will try to explain it in more depth hoping to get through the problem.
I built a desktop application using JavaFX 2.2 which uses a WebEngine to access a website built using Oracle ADF Pages. The application tracks the users actions on the pages and stores data to a database. All fine so far until the point where I need show a PDF file on a user click.
On the actual website the user clicks a button and a new popup window opens up that displays the PDF.
My problem is that due to the lack of PDF support in JavaFX I cannot display the pdf. The actual link to the PDF is dynamic and it doesn't have a .pdf at the end of it so I can't use the actual URL to send it to an external bowser or something to display it. Additionally the connection is secure so I can't open the URL with Chrome for example.
Possible solutions I thought about are to read the binary data of the response from WebView and create the PDF file locally and then open it using Adobe of Chrome or something. Is that possible at all?
Another solution I thought about (while I am writing this question) is maybe to open the URL which the users default browser but how can I go about sending the secure connection cookie from the application to the browser.
Is any of the above even possible? Am I missing something?
Any help, clues, links, ideas would be very much appreciated.
Thanks
I think the best way to do what you want is to download the PDF and display it locally.
Downloading using WebView sounds like it could work but I'm not familiar with the user experience. As an alternative try using curl or wget. You can pass in the authorization cookie to those tools and use them to download the file
I'm trying to understand how programs like PhoneGap and Adobe Air work, that allow you to 'write once and run anywhere' on mobile platforms. The way I understand it now is that you build your application as a web app using either HTML5, or flash, or I don't know what, and it takes in those files and converts them to the proper types for each mobile OS. Assuming this is correct, what I would like to know is, what the options for developing web apps that are able to be converted into apps are; and what the most popular platforms to use/learn flash, or html5, or JavaScript, or I have no idea what are.
I want to build a web app to deploy across multiple phone platforms, but I don't know where to start. Thanks for the help!
You use tools like PhoneGap to access native device API's through JavaScript. If you don't need access to these API's you can write a HTML5 app and install it using "Add to home screen" etc.
As HTML5 matures, more and more of the device API's are actually directly available through HTML5 (for instance GPS), so depending on what you want to do access it might be in/scheduled to be part of the Device API.
Write once and run anywhere
There are different frameworks that lets you deploy to multiple platforms through the device specific install process. These tools usually work in 2 ways. Run in an embedded browser, or compile to native code.
PhoneGap runs the HTML5 part of your app in an embedded browser. Other tools like MonoTouch actually cross-compiles to native code, so they run on the bare metal.
Cross platform using HTML5
There are plenty of frameworks you can use to make mobile apps with HTML5. These usually help make the app "feel native", and includes abstractions over device specific idioms that differ between the different devices.
Popular frameworks includes Sencha Touch, JQuery Mobile and a bunch of others.
If you want the users to install the app through the AppStore/Market etc. then a solution like PhoneGap is a good option. If you don't care about that you can write your app and add a meta tag like
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">
and when you add it to the home screen it'll look just like any other app and run in an embedded browser without the browser window etc. You can add offline capabilities using HTML5 and synch when users go on-line etc. all just using HTML5.
Have a look at the Sencha touch app gallery to see what is possible with this technology.
Google Chrome has ProxyPlus and Firefox has FoxyProxy among others. I was wondering why Safari has no counterpart in its Plugin gallery. There seems to be great need for such stuff in countries where Internet is censored.
I would like to develop one myself. But firstly I would like to know whether it is possible using Apple's API and whether Apple allows such extension. And if so, why no one ever comes up with it?
Any pointer about APIs are also welcome.
Thanks.