Mobile web app fail

As an experiment I wanted to see if a web app could be created that would send images from a wi-fi enabled mobile device to a computer. The reason was that the computer could easily serve the web app directly to a user's mobile device and the user could then upload their images to the computer and both operations could be done without needing to download a native app from an application vendor or use a data plan.

The proof-of-concept requirements were fairly broad and simple: serve the necessary files that make up the web app from the computer, allow the user to choose image files, and upload the images to the computer. Serving the files was simple, I created a basic stand-alone server process that could respond to requests for files and also handle the image files that were uploaded to it via XHRs from the device's browser. The user requested the start page by scanning a QR code that launched the browser and navigated to the app's URL. Problems really started with the web browsers available on mobile devices.

The largest problem was the iOS web browser. Prior to recently released iOS 6 the iOS browser didn't allow the user to choose files for upload. The basic HTML "input" element with type "file" was not supported in the browser. It seems hard to believe this was an unintentional oversight on Apple's part. The practical effect was that this forced developers to create native iOS apps rather than allowing them to create a single web app for any mobile device. There will remain a large number of devices running iOS 5 and earlier versions of iOS for years to come. As developers we will be living with a crippled iOS browser for a long time. IE 6 anyone?

The next problem involved displaying thumbnails of multiple images. On my Nexus S phone both the native and Chrome browsers crashed after opening multiple images. Looking at the logs I found that the browsers were running out of memory. I was able to improve the situation considerably, but not entirely fix it, by setting the img element's width and height attributes to the size of the image that actually displayed rather than relying on CSS.

Once that problem was minimized I was able to select images, insert the thumbnails into the DOM and then upload the the files to the computer. Some positives from this experiment: all of the Android browsers had partial support for the File API (notable exception below), data URIs could be used to access the image information in the files, and finally @font-face support so I could use Font Awesome for the images on buttons and menus. Negatives: while the File API's File object is supported Android doesn't have multi-file select functionality for browsers. Each image file had to be chosen one at a time from the Gallery application which became tedious by the second file selection.

I'd like to mention that of the three browsers I used during development only Mozilla's Firefox browser for Android was able to reliably display and upload files. Unfortunately for the proof-of-concept web app it had to run on at least the iOS and Android native browsers. Other browsers like Firefox or Dolphin just don't have a large enough market share to make them an acceptable solution.

Having said that, my experience with the shortcomings of many mobile web browsers has reinforced my belief that Mozilla's mobile browser and Firefox mobile operating system are as important now as Firefox was ten years ago in helping to push innovation forward, especially on mobile devices, and to keep the web open.

Lastly a tool that was indispensable and made development easier and faster was desktop Firefox's Responsive Design View mode. In this mode (available under the "Web Developer" menu) the browser's viewport is resized to emulate various common monitor and mobile device screen dimensions or you can set custom dimensions as needed. Using this I was able to set the browser to the same size as my phone and do most of the development work on my desktop, only using the phone to periodically test functionality. If you need to design a web page that is "responsive" to different size screens or screens that change size, like switching from portrait to landscape then this tool is a must have.

Set an Android ringtone

Android has a lot of quirks and annoyances, a common one is setting a custom ringtone, then later no ringtone plays when there is an incoming call (the phone is silent). This happens when the audio file is not located in the correct file location or the wrong application is used when choosing an audio file as a ringtone. Later if the phone is plugged into a computer and the USB file system is enabled the custom ringtone becomes unavailable and the OS "forgets" the ringtone. This is how to use and set a custom ringtone from an mp3, ogg, etc. audio file so that the phone won't forget:

1. Connect your phone to a PC and copy the file to the folder \sdcard\media\audio\ringtones on your phone. You must create any of these folders that don't exist.
2. Disconnect your phone from the PC.
3. Select a contact and from the menu choose "Set ringtone". If given the option to choose an application to select the ringtone choose "Media Storage" and then select the "Always" button. Never use any application other than "Media Storage" to choose the audio file.
4. From the list of available media choose your ringtone (the name that appears depends on the IDv3 tags in the audio file you added). But wait! What if you don't see the file you just added? The media list is populated by the OS scanning periodically for audio files and it can take some time to discover the new file. So you have two options: first is to just wait a while and retry until the file shows up in the list, second you can clear the media cache and force it to rebuild which still means waiting a while. To clear the cache do this: menu - Manage Apps - All - Media Storage - Clear data. Now reboot the phone and wait for Media Storage data to be rebuilt. This can take tens of minutes. Eventually your audio file will show up in the list.

You can also set the phone's default ringtone by selecting System settings - Sound - Phone ringtone in place of step 3. That's it, now your ringtones should always be available even after treating the phone as USB storage.