I built a fitness "progressive" web app that you can add to your phone home screen. It guides the user through a 7 minute workout.
Is there any way to keep the screen "awake" so the user doesn't have to keep coming back to the phone to turn it on? Another drawback to the screen sleeping is the javascript timer stops, ruining the workout timing.
https://www.w3.org/TR/wake-lock/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/API/Wake_Lock_API
Basically, yes, there is such a thing as a website forcing the screen to stay awake, but it is non-standard currently. It may become standard but right now it seems to only work on FirefoxOS. This is however to be the intended way to achieve wake locking in javascript.
Another solution though that's more of a hack is doing something along the lines of playing a hidden video in the background since as far as i know most browsers stay awake if a video is playing.
Related
I'm building a website with HTML5 audio, including custom audio controls and visualization using JavaScript.
When opening the website in my mobile browser (I've only tested Android/Chrome, but I assume similar behavior on other systems), after a few seconds the screen will turn off and soon after the audio will stop playing.
Is there an official way in HTML oder JavaScript to tell the browser to keep the audio playing with screen turned off?
Side information: there is Screen Wake Lock API preventing the mobile screen from turning off. Since my website provides music, I want the phone to turn off the screen if desired, only keep playing the audio.
I added the mentioned Screen Wake Lock API on my homepage, activating it as soon as the user starts the music and the screen doesn't turn off by default anymore. However, if I now turn off the screen manually (Android/Chrome), the music will keep playing.
This solves the issue in the case we are fine with having the screen staying on by default, so for me this question is answered.
After some time of inactivity my laptop screen will darken and then turn off, as specified by my power saving settings. However if a YouTube video is playing then this doesn't happen. So either youtube.com is preventing this or my OS disables this power save feature when a webpage is playing a video.
I'm making a web application exercise timer. As the user is exercising when using it, they don't touch the mouse or keyboard meaning that the energy save kicks in and turns off the display. From test usage I can say this is very annoying!
How can I disable this behaviour while a exercise timer is running? I suppose I could hack it with a hidden video playing in the background but I was hoping for a better solution.
This question is a duplicate of: Can I prevent phone from sleep on a webpage
However it's a bit out of date, there is now a Wake Lock API but it's still experimental: http://boiler23.github.io/screen-wake/
Ive decided to go with a library, this seems the most popular: https://github.com/richtr/NoSleep.js
I'm currently working on something that uses a livestream from Ustream as a fixed background. At the moment, it only works on desktop, and I personally think that it wouldn't be the best idea to do this for mobile because of performance and so on (not to mention, I would hate for my mobile data to be chowed down by a video I cannot control). I'm simply curious if it is possible at the moment.
I tried it, just for fun, but realized that it doesn't autoplay and if I do initiate it by hitting play, a media player opens up with the stream in it - at least on iOS.
Just got me wondering if this was possible. I mean, facebook and instagram do it without opening up a media player, so I'm sure it is, but I'm assuming it's not as straightforward as I would want it to be.
Curious to hear your thoughts!
It is possible, but I guess more likely it depends on the device and the browser what it using, I tried now with this url: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/ on my S9+ with the Samsung browser and it works for me if I ask the desktop version of the website. However I suggest to forget the background videos or the users will hate you when your app/site will consume all of their mobile data. And I don't want to mention the lower end devices. Those may not support or if support it will have a bad experience to view a background video.
For background video: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_fullscreen_video.asp
Normally a real stream doesn't have too much difference compared to a static video if we just strictly viewing the background video/stream part.
It is possible, there is a good article on it here.
As the article describes...
By default, it can only autoplay when the video is muted. But for
webkit/iOs you also need a second attribute; playsinline. This
attribute makes it so that it, well, plays inline (and doesn’t
automatically jump to fullscreen video)
More information from google and webkit
Is there a way to detect if an application (say a chat client or msword) is on top of my browser window.
One way is to check for focus. But that does not absolutely say that another program is on top of the "view-able" area of the browser with respect to complete screen.
What if the complete browser is viewable but the focus is on the word document/chat client.
Edit:
Found a sample demo from a company which does this http://www.spider.io/vStp83jg6/
I don't think this requires flash or any plugin, in order to be effective this has to be based on CSS and Javascript.
The security sandbox of the browser prevents accessing this information from the operating system.
The only thing that they can be doing consistently across browsers is to detect some sort of side effect of the fact that the browser window is hidden by another window.
One of the side effects that can be detected is if browser rendering optimizations for painting elements have kicked in or not.
According to the spider.io viewability video, they are already detecting if an add is visible based on browser rendering optimizations detection.
If an add is not visible, then for that section of the page rendering optimizations kick in and the rendering of that section of the page will become slower, in order to save memory and CPU resources, and speed up the rendering of the visible portion of the page.
This same technique could be used to detect if a browser window is hidden or not.
If they detect that rendering optimizations are ongoing in several regions like the 4 corners of the visible viewport and the center of the page they can safely assume that the app is hidden by another external app, or calculate an estimation for the percentage overlap.
They don't say how they do it in detail, but as it's based on speed measurements it might be something like this:
One way that could be used for detecting if another window is hiding the browser:
Create a small invisible CSS3 or Javascript based animation that animates invisible elements in different parts of the page. The animations should not affect the performance of the page and can be started/stopped at will.
Measure the timings of the animation at page startup, and take an average. If the page get's hidden by another OS window, then the rendering optimizations kick in and the time that the animation takes to run is longer.
Check here a browser API to detect the start and stop of CSS3 animations, this could be a way to implement this.
Commercial web traffic data harvested by company such as Alexa. Is performed by installed software, such as toolbars. And tracks the users activity, programs, windows open.... everything... (with consent)
Controversial answer, it does the above without consent (spyware?)
Note the key point of the above 2 method. is that the data comes from a sample of computers in which the software is installed. Not every visitor of the site (unless visiting the site inserts the spyware)
By having custom software installed. They can get around all the respective browser related restrictions / security.
Perhaps more can be found by providing information on the companies that claim to do this?
What's the best way to show an animation from after effects on a website onload?
It needs to play like a load screen in all major browsers and iOS devices.
What's the best way to show this?
I tried html5 and the auto play didn't work on iPad. I don't want to use flash. The animation is too complex for just JavaScript. Is it worth trying to make a high quality animated GIF?
Well, your main problem with virtually any onload video is going to be load and buffer time, especially on a mobile device. If the splash screen takes half a minute to load, the experience will be very subpar, and there's virtually nothing you can really do to reduce that load time short of making the video low quality (a large animated gif will have the same problem).
My recommendation would be to try coding the animation using pure HTML5 animation effects if possible. They will render faster, use only static images, javascript and CSS, and will be more widely compatible with modern desktop and mobile browsers.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to auto-play html5 video on an iOS device. At least as of iOS 5, Apple has disabled both auto-play and pre-loading, presumably to save bandwidth for users who may be on limited or expensive mobile data plans.
Unless you're willing to skip the video, the only workaround is to get the visitor to click or touch something on the page. Mobile Safari will allow you to play a video using Javascript methods (as opposed to the native player controls), but the first call to .play() has to come from a "click" or "touch" event handler.
You can limit this requirement to iPads and still allow desktop browsers to auto-play, but there doesn't appear to be any kind of reliable feature-detection method, so you have to parse the User Agent string (navigator.userAgent).
There isn't much documentation on the strange, non-standard things Mobile Safari does with video, but this article has some very good, detailed information and some code samples:
http://blog.millermedeiros.com/html5-video-issues-on-the-ipad-and-how-to-solve-them/
Edit: And then there's this elaborate and absurd workaround that Apple uses on its own site.
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1GWTMLjqQsQS45FWwqNG9ztQTdGF48hQYpjQHR_d1WsI