Most sites are either fully released, or in beta.
But what happens if you have a large site, and some of the parts are still in Beta, and other parts aren't.
How do you effectively communicate this to the customer?
Maybe take a look at how Facebook, Bloglines, Gmail did it?
Like "We have this beta thing going on, come on over and see the same site with new stuff, but if it doesnt work, use the old parts"
Maybe gmail labs where you can sign up for "beta features"
If there's a certain way you enter the part of the beta site, maybe you can have a modal that pops up that they have to agree to every time. I wouldn't have it on every page since it gets annoying, so I would only use this approach if there is a definitive way to get into that part of the site (e.g. people won't be coming to random parts of the beta section through Google or something).
One way I've used for non-web software is a change to background. So for example if your normal site tended to have a plain white background, you could have the beta site have a repeating beta text in a background image. You want to make it fairly faint so it is present but doesn't detract from the overall experience.
Another subtle but present option would just be to change the title bar.
Or you could do what google does, which is a large site with some of it in beta. Check out Google experimental search. Basically the site is no different, but it is hard to get to accidentally.
There are a few ways.
Provide access to the site via two domains (e.g. www.domain.com and beta.domain.com) and only allow access to beta parts of the site when going in via beta.domain.com.
People will be accessing the same code base, but will only get access to the beta sections if they've specified the beta subdomain. Trying to access beta sections of the site will explain this & tell them how to access the beta.
Strongly Flag the beta sections of the application as being beta, and force the user to acknowledge that they're OK using beta features with some kind of agreement screen. The first time they try to use the beta feature, they'll be shown the agreement screen. Subsequent uses of the feature will prominently deisplay that "thios part of the site is in beta and is used at your own peril."
Related
So here's the situation. I am using a third party digital document signing service called PandaDoc in my mobile application which is built on PhoneGap/Cordova and I am not able to change any of the input, text-type fields when attempting to do this via the mobile app on an iPhone (haven't tested Android yet).
Here are some things i noted about this:
1) When viewed online in Chrome (on my laptop) or on my phone in the Chrome browser everything works fine.
2) The only form elements that aren't working on mobile are the input (type=text) ones. The checkboxes work, the dropdowns work etc...
3) I don't know much about Angular.js but i can tell this third party app was built on it. When i inspect and compare the mobile vs web version i noticed that on the mobile version the input fields have these two directives:
ng-pristine and ng-touched
From what i can tell researching these, they seem to be mutually exclusive so not sure how that would affect things. Also the web version had:
ng-dirty and ng-valid-parse
both of which the mobile version did not have.
I know it would be best if i could post some code here but i don't know where to start. In my app there is just a simple embed script that puts the PandaDoc into an iFrame.
If you want to see the mobile test version of this app you can view it at http://dev.velexo.com/m2 I have a test user with a username of "mobile2" and the password is "pass". Unfortunately there is no easy way to send out the iphone app version of this and that is where the problem is.
Oh also, when you log into the application, click on the W9 Information button and then the Enter Your W9 button, this is what brings up the pandadoc
Also should have mentioned I'm using JQuery Mobile in the app.
Any advice/guidance would be welcome even if it's just a guess.
just looking over my old questions here. The answer to the actual question I asked is that you can not change anything in an iFrame from the parent frame unless both the domain and the port match due to the cross-domain policy restraints.
There are no ways around this that I am aware of.
The solution to my particular problem was to get rid of PandaDoc entirely because it just wasn't designed to be used on a mobile device. In the end i wrote my own javascript for creating a signature and passing to the backend where i used a php pdf generating library to construct the final document.
I was wondering if anyone could point me to any useful tutorials on allowing a master user to update information for their app. I am looking into creating an application for a local restaurant and I want the owner to be able to update information like the soup of the day and such by themselves.
I have been looking into JSON and CMS for this, but I am unable to find any useful information regarding iOS 8 or xCode 6. If anyone could provide me with this information, or any other suggestions on how to achieve this I would be very grateful!
(I am using Swift not Objective-C)
This is not a code issue, rather it is a development concept issue. You have many choices including making an API that is updated by the restaurant. The app then connects to the API and gets the recipes. If you feel you need to do this via the App make a special username that is allowed access to modify the menu. This can be accomplished via matching username exactly or via using a regex. It all really depends on the structure of your app platform.
I'm developing for the Xbox with XNA currently, but when I click on several links to the official Microsoft site, e.g. tutorials and files, then I get redirected to this page:
http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/19992.aspx
For example by clicking this link:
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/skinned_model
Anyone having the same problems with the official Microsoft site currently?
Yes. Microsoft are aware of this issue - although I'm not privy to any information about when/if they will fix it.
Basically, as part of the move to Windows Phone 8, they've separated out the Xbox and Phone development stuff.
If you come across old links like that, you can usually repair them by hand by changing the domain like so:
forums.create.msdn.com becomes xboxforums.create.msdn.com (change the subdomain)
And
create.msdn.com becomes xbox.create.msdn.com (add a subdomain)
Yes.
It'd be like this for a month now. It seems to suggest they are trying to downplay XNA for Windows 8 development which is saddening! You could always use Google's caching service to view the pages if you are finding them from Google... I don't think this will work for downloads though!
I want to test a terminal emulator I have, but I really don't want to learn Hercules 360, before someone mentions that.
I'm not after creating mainframe applications, what really want to do is learn how to send tn3270 screens for display on a terminal emulator. My reason is simple; I have a set of screens from a customer where their layout, look and feel, etc are all fixed. I want to test my client software against those screens without having to trail all the way out to the customers site to do it in the first instance.
Failing that, does anyone know of a "less intense" method of simulating a tn3270 environment complete with fields, attributes, etc.. ?
I found a reference to an old freeware product called miniFrame by CodeCutter, but the website for it no longer exists and google returns various links that just point back to it.
Thanks
Can you tell me if Apple accepts an application that opens an embedded browser with most of the functionality living on a web application on the internet?
I have read contradicting opinions on this, and I have even seen several apps that seem to use an embedded browser for the main functionality of the app. Still I couldn't confirm this.
This way we could correct problems on the application functionality on the server with no need to submit another version of the app, while keeping the ease of release through the app store and the home screen shortcut.
Thanks!
I can't get the exact quote from the guidelines, but I know that Cordova apps are allowed, and updating the web files dynamically without going through a new native app version is also allowed, as long as:
* The updated code runs with the Safari Webkit engine (true for Cordova)
* The main functionality of the app is not changed
You say this is a bad idea because the user can save a bookmark on their home screen. This doesn't seem to me like a reason for something being a bad idea to me. If this is the only drawback then I would say go ahead and do it. Why should I care if someone wants to bookmark to my site? The app will not work very well outside the app anyway. If you have an actual logical reason why this is a bad idea instead of some emotional response then please bring it up.
I am doing this too in my application. I am under the impression that as long as you are pointing to a secure site then it should be okay. Please enlighten me: is there some good reason why Apple forces people to develop applications the hard way? A web application is hard enough without having to deal with some monolithic organisation imposing ridiculous rules on you.