[Building Sakai] How to support proliferation of new tablets in CLE

[Matthew Jones]

Yea, this is a somewhat tough issue (contenteditable) because as this post
says

"This works great but for someone looking to get this going on iPhone/iPad:
the contentEditable property IS defined. Trouble is the OS doesn't actually
support " -
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1882205/how-do-i-detect-support-for-contenteditable-via-javascript

So if you try to use feature detection (like Modernizr) then it will still
succeed. And if you do device detection, then it works in iOS5 but fails in
iOS4!

Getting rid of WURFL as Steve suggested is a good idea though. Both because
of licensing problems and because it just sits there taking up 100MB in the
heap at all times.

The good news is for your original question (1) is that the new mobile
browsers (iOS 5+ and Android 3.0+) are finally supporting this specific
feature for editing (http://caniuse.com/contenteditable). And as far as
I've seen in usage reports and overall usage (at least at Michigan),
tablets are still either lightly used or used as as secondary option when a
notebook is also available. So there's still a year or two till they're
everywhere. :)

For the (2) part, Steve's solution will make changing the string easier and
more legal than changing the WURFL, so that really should be done. I think
that the more important thing for the medium term future will be combining
feature detection with device/form factor detection (
https://github.com/PaulKinlan/formfactor) to ensure the optimal user
experience. You're realistically not going to want to present the same view
to a mobile phone with a 10 cm diagonal as one with a 25 cm diagonal.

It also seems like if the feature detection was available client side (like
in one of these js libraries) disabling specific features in certain places
(like forums) would be much easier.
On Jan 9, 2012 1:56 AM, "David Horwitz" <david.horwitz at uct.ac.za> wrote:

> Just a point for people looking at making a feature
> available/unavailable it is far better to query the service (being WURFL
> or Mobile detect based) for capabilities rather than specific devices.
> Part of the fragility of the current use is that it ask "is this an
> iPhone" rather than "does this device support feature x".
>
> D
>
> On 01/09/2012 01:01 AM, Steve Swinsburg wrote:
> > Hi Keli,
> >
> > The portal currently uses the WURFL library to detect mobile devices,
> however recent license changes means we cannot upgrade, so I am looking at
> switching it to an alternative project called Mobile Detect, which is based
> on MobileESP and available in the maven repositories. It is Apache2.
> >
> > https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-21334
> >
> > Once the code is cleaned up then tools will be able to check the mobile
> device easier, and via an entityprovider.
> >
> > cheers,
> > Steve
> >
> >
> > On 07/01/2012, at 11:42 AM, Keli Sato Amann wrote:
> >
> >> Hello,
> >> We are running 2.6 locally, but we added the patch that suppresses the
> rich text entry of the fckeditor and replaces it with simple text entry
> that comes with 2.8. We have manually updated that patch to do this switch
> when it detects additional useragents (iphone, and now Android phones and
> iPad).
> >>
> >> I was hoping this also covered Android tablets, but we just tested it
> on a Nook and we still see the non-responsive rich text options. So we will
> have to manually update this to include the useragent for the Nook and I
> guess the Kindle Fire if we can find one to test.
> >>
> >> My questions are this:
> >> 1) Is the rich text entry of the ckeditor (which I think comes with
> 2.9) supported on iOS and Android devices or will we need to continue this
> workaround?
> >>
> >> 2) If we have to continue this workaround, is there a different string
> we can search on that isn't quite so specific that would cover all iOS and
> Android devices so we can stop updating this?
> >>
> >> 3) We created another dependency: in Forums, we hid the Delete and
> Setting options for Topics so that they only show during a hover. We want
> to completely hide these options on touch devices (while it is possible to
> get this to display with a double click, this is confusing). So now we need
> to do the useragent check in two locations. Is there a way to maintain the
> approved list in just one location?
> >>
> >> I may not understand any of your answers, so I'm cc'ing Lydia ;-)
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Keli Amann
> >> User Experience Specialist
> >> Academic Computing Services
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