editing with ipad

fkelly · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 12:59 pm

can anyone think o a reason why our wysiwyg text area boxes are not editable with an ipad. I can administer most other areas of y sites with an ipad but I can't even get the cursor to focus in a text area box. It's not Flash which of course Apple won't coexist with.

nuken · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 1:20 pm

Try Opera Mini for iPad. It works well....

Palbin · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 2:26 pm

From what I can tell it is an ipad problem. It appears that the new ckeditor does not work either.

fkelly · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 3:13 pm

I will try Opera when I get a chance. My IPAD has lines across it which == bad display. They need to replace it but first [rant]I need to back it up to ITUNES but first I need to finish a Paypal application for a bike club and work on Mantis and look at Palbin's new Wiki entry and a figure out why the html directory for a site just vanished and a thousand other things. Who says being retired is easy? [/rant]. It is strange that you can edit fields with normal text in them on a form but not text areas.

montego · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 6:49 pm

fkelly, just curious. Is the issue only with the text areas that are really the editor? Or, do ALL text areas exhibit this behavior?

fkelly · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 7:45 pm

I will have to try this out tomorrow and get back to you M. Along with trying Opera on the IPAD. Actually, maybe it will be a couple of days because I am returning the IPAD cause of the bad screen and am not sure when I will get to test.

fkelly · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 7:43 am

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or google IPAD textarea

there's a lot of hits. I haven't had time to process them or try the suggestions out in RN, but clearly there are some issues and some things we need to do to make RN friendly to IPADS and the like. To be continued ...

nuken · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:13 am

With my mobile theme, I use the user agent to detect mobile devices and set the theme based on that. If the mobile theme is selected, I disable the editor in function wysiwyg_textarea like so:

Code:

if ($advanced_editor == 0 or !isset($_COOKIE) or $ThemeSel == 'mobile')

I did not set the theme for ipad because I did not have access to one when I was testing the theme. I did test it on iPhone3 and 4, iPod, Android 2.x and 3.x and Blackberry.

montego · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 12:32 pm

fkelly, I have a feeling that if RN would move towards HTML5/CSS3, these issues might go away? I do see many threads regarding textareas within tables. Most of the forms in RN are wrapped with tables and this is completely unnecessary now-a-days.

Won't know for sure, but RN really, really, really should be moving in that direction and away from XHTML 1.0 Transitional... JMO.

spasticdonkey · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 2:40 pm

montego wrote:

fkelly, I have a feeling that if RN would move towards HTML5/CSS3, these issues might go away? I do see many threads regarding textareas within tables. Most of the forms in RN are wrapped with tables and this is completely unnecessary now-a-days.

Won't know for sure, but RN really, really, really should be moving in that direction and away from XHTML 1.0 Transitional... JMO.

for me personally I'm not quite ready to jump on the HTML5/CSS3 bandwagon just yet, considering it will only look and work as intended on the very latest of browsers. Although I have to admit I have no experience with mobile devices; as I live in a pretty remote area... Are they all geared toward HTML5/CSS3?

I do have an open issue for "Form accessibility and standardization", although it won't help fckeditor issues. This gives a pretty good idea of some of what we are after w/ forms:

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There a good deal of work involved as most forms in RN do not have proper label elements; so I can't guarantee this will make it into the next release.

Palbin · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 5:43 pm

montego, One thing we are doing for the next release, which we have set a date for, is that 2.5 will be void of the following tags:

Code:

<acronym>
<applet>
<basefont>
<big>
<center>
<dir>
<font>
<frame> (Other that PhpBB 2 Admin)
<frameset> (Other that PhpBB 2 Admin)
<noframes> (Other that PhpBB 2 Admin)
<s>
<strike>
<tt>
<u>
<i>
<b>
<xmp>

There will still be a lot of deprecated inline attributes, but there is only so much time in a day Wink

fkelly · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 9:30 pm

M. just to get back to you on one point. I was trying to think of an area in RN where we had a textarea that was not also part of the wysiwyg editor. Your home in RNYA is one such place (modules/YA/public/edithome. I tried editing there from my IPAD and it works. So the problem is something to do with the editor and not with all textareas per se.

I don't see this as being an immediate, top priority issue and possibly another browser besides Safari may work on my IPAD. IN RN 2.5 you (signed on as admin) will be able to edit any block, the same way you do the opening message now. I have it implemented on my bike club site and think it's a great feature. It would be cool to be able to use it from the IPAD on the couch while watching TV.

montego · Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2011 10:50 am

spasticdonkey wrote:

considering it will only look and work as intended on the very latest of browsers.

No longer entirely true. There are some really nice fall-back JavaScript and other techniques that have really matured in this past year. That will even keep most sites "reasonable" with even back to IE6 (although I'm not condoning any support for it whatsoever). It was just inevitable as folks began to really peal back the HTML5/CSS3 onion (and the explosion of mobile devices), we would start to see really clever ways to not "break the web" (a key principle of HTML5).

I am definitely very much interested in moving forward on this as I believe the recent iPad commercial is absolutely coming true, and FAST: "how people do these things will never be the same". There is already a HTML5/CSS3 thread started by djmaze, so that might be a more appropriate thread to continue the discussion on?

My company, a really old large very conservative conglomerate, has even jumped big time on the bandwagon.

Guardian2003 · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 2:49 am

Just visiting lol...
Don't forget the iPhone / iPad has a limitation on the maximum file size of JS it can handle and I believe JS has to be loaded with x bytes of the document head.
Given from what I read here that the issue is only with wysiwyg editor text boxes and our implementation of CK/FCK Editor relies on JS to load it, it might be worth investigating further.

fkelly · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 8:31 am

There is a good discussion here:

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It does not sound like there is an easy workaround on our end. Sounds like Apple will have to fix their browser. I will try the Opera Mini now that I have my replacement IPAD ... the screen on the original died.

montego · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 8:44 am

Uuugghhh... Apple. My new Nemesis... It is definitely things like this which has kept me from buying a tablet. Been waiting for Android tablets to mature. I just hate closed minded companies which produce closed systems. I just also hate the fact that they are so popular (Apple's products) that we are forced to support them. What a two-edged sword.

fkelly · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 9:15 am

Yes, I agree completely about Apple. I walked away from the Apple store yesterday with the words "smug" and "arrogant" running through my mind. They COULD support Flash but refuse to thus making many web pages inaccessible to many users.

That was easy. Tried Opera Mini on my IPAD. It doesn't work either. I'm not sure what user agent the system sees when an IPAD is browsing. Our fckeditor.php program checks to see if the browser is compatible. If we could teach it that any IPAD browser is not compatible and have it output a normal textarea that might be a work around. Or just turn the variable $advanced_editor off in the mainfile function wysiwyg_textarea when an IPAD is in use. Or even better just change the if statement in that function to test if it's an IPAD:

Code:

if ($advanced_editor == 0 || !isset($_COOKIE)) {

I don't know what a reliable test would be though, have to look into that ... problem is that I can't test on my localhost cause there is none on the IPAD.

fkelly · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 9:57 am

Here is a stupid pet trick that fixes the situation by turning the advanced editor off for IPADS. It should work for either OPERA or Safari on the IPAD; I looked at the user agents for both and they have the string '(iPad' in them.

Modify mainfile wysiwyg_text area function to do this (I'll quote the whole thing)

Code:

nction wysiwyg_textarea($name, $value, $config = 'NukeUser', $cols = 50, $rows = 10) {
global $admin, $advanced_editor;
// Don't waste bandwidth by loading WYSIWYG editor for crawlers
   if ( isset( $_SERVER ) ) {
   $sAgent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ;
}
else {
   if ( isset( $HTTP_SERVER_VARS ) ) {
      $sAgent = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ;
   }
   else {
      $sAgent = $HTTP_USER_AGENT ;
   }
}
if (strstr($sAgent, 'iPad')) {
$advanced_editor = 0;
}
if ($advanced_editor == 0 || !isset($_COOKIE)) {
   echo '<textarea name="' . $name . '" cols="' . $cols . '" rows="' . $rows . '">' . $value . '</textarea>';
} else {
   include_once NUKE_INCLUDE_DIR . 'fckeditor/fckeditor.php';
   $rows = $rows + 2; // Add extra space for toolbars
   $oFCKeditor = new FCKeditor($name) ;
   $oFCKeditor->BasePath = './includes/fckeditor/' ; // 2.6
   $oFCKheight = $rows * 20;
   $oFCKeditor->Height = $oFCKheight;
   $oFCKeditor->ToolbarSet = $config;
   if (is_admin($admin)) {
      $oFCKeditor->Config['LinkBrowser'] = true;
      $oFCKeditor->Config['ImageBrowser'] = true;
      $oFCKeditor->Config['FlashBrowser'] = true;
      $oFCKeditor->Config['LinkUpload'] = true;
      $oFCKeditor->Config['ImageUpload'] = true;
      $oFCKeditor->Config['FlashUpload'] = true;
   }
   $oFCKeditor->Value = $value;
   $oFCKeditor->Create();
}
}

I recognize that we could do this in rnconfig also where we initially set $advanced_editor.

Note that if you are editing a block that was created on a real computer with the wyiswyg editor you are likely to have some "sophisticated" html within it to edit non-wysiwyg. However, on my site I have some simple blocks with just text in them that I maintain and change frequently (I have an approved users block where I and fellow admins keep track of users who have been approved but not activated so we aren't all approving them and sending duplicative emails) and being able to edit the block on the IPAD while watching the Yankees beat Boston will be great.

There might be other devices like the IPHONE we'd want to add into the test but I don't have them to test.

montego · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 10:25 am

fkelly wrote:

There might be other devices like the IPHONE we'd want to add into the test but I don't have them to test.

Haven't looked yet for others, but I know that there are Blackberry emulators out there. Unfortunately, I've found that even though the emulator we have been using says it supports all kinds of BBOS versions, while it might, that doesn't mean the browsers all act the same as their physical counterparts. Kind of frustrating. One cannot possibly have every possibly device to test things with. Good emulators are definitely needed for testing things out on a local desk/laptop.

Another thing to look for is a service similar to what we used to have with desktop browsers where you could pass it a URL and check which browsers/version you want to test and it will produce screen shots for you. Would be nice if there was something like this for mobile devices.

kguske · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6044

I'm pretty happy with the Asus EEE Pad Transformer running Android Honeycomb 3.2. I haven't tested it with RN, but it displays Flash just fine... iWho cares?

unicornio · Involved Joined: Aug 13, 2009 Posts: 432

Guys! I do know you could be frustrated about apple devices but I must admit it! I got the iphone 4 one month ago and I couldn't believe it when I had it on my hand. This is one of the best phone in the world. I just took 10 photos in seconds. The software is so smooth and the touch screen is so sensitive u can get addictive.

dad7732 · Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2011 8:50 am

unicornio wrote:

Guys! I do know you could be frustrated about apple devices but I must admit it! I got the iphone 4 one month ago and I couldn't believe it when I had it on my hand. This is one of the best phone in the world. I just took 10 photos in seconds. The software is so smooth and the touch screen is so sensitive u can get addictive.

Try to run a Flash video. Or maybe you're not interested in Flash?

unicornio · Involved Joined: Aug 13, 2009 Posts: 432

Almost any videos you can find on youtube and I can watch any video on youtube on my iphon 4 without any issue and much more quality than my old phone Samsung S8000 Jet. Anyway, Flash sites are not popular anymore and it is hard to modify it and cost lots of money.

kguske · Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6044

Sorry...let's not turn this into a fan boy fight over which platforms are better.

The issue is to what extent do we want to modify RN to accommodate closed platforms?

I tested nukeWYSIWYG on the Asus EEE Pad Transformer (Android Honeycomb 3.2). It worked fine, but certain tasks (e.g. highlighting a word to bold) were difficult due to the touch interface.

fkelly · Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2011 7:02 am

Quote:

The issue is to what extent do we want to modify RN to accommodate closed platforms? "

Absolutely you are right Kevin. That is the issue. The mainfile "fix" I posted resolves the problem with wysiwyg for an IPAD. Thinking down the road, if Apple later fixes their IOS so that it can deal with the wysiwyg editor, my fix itself could keep you from using wysiwyg with an IPAD. There might be a ... no I can say there definitely would be a way to put some kind of parameter in to turn the fix on or off but then again if you did that and you had some IPADS that were IOS5 (the fixed version) and some that were IOS4 you'd still have a problem.

All I can say is that for me, as a person running a web site and as an IPAD owner, it is helpful to be able to use an IPAD to edit pages ... in limited circumstances of course ... and having the fix is thus helpful. Whether we want to put it into the next distribution is beyond my salary grade Smile

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