Tuesday, January 29, 2019

A Significant Step Towards Creating an APP

The next version (54) of toraware was needed to convert toraware.com's website to run as a mobile app.

The main obstacle had been one of the options for the gematria method where I allow the user to choose between keyboard textual input or numerical input.

Although from the very beginning of my development I foresaw adapting my website to be suitable for an app, as you can see from the site's navigation paradigm, I did not foresee that this option to display for use of the keyboard would get in the way. Because deploying the site as is would have the site's keyboard and the smartphone's keyboard both be on display the same time.

In other words, I had created a pop-up keyboard feature that would be intrusive to the user of a mobile gadget when his screen pops up a 2nd keyboard, besides his usual mode of keyboard entry. So I had codeo my way out of this problem.

(The two images below demonstrate that troublesome 3rd option still existing in version 53, one that I originally introduced when it wasn't very common to have Hebrew language input readily available on the casual user's computer screen. It's the one that reads, "How will you enter the value?")

User can enter a number directly
Keyboard pops up on this option













In effect, I had coded myself into a design dilemma. But then I realized how to easily remedy the situation. I could simply suppress all keyboard display on my part, leaving the user with only his own gadget's keyboard for entry, and all I had to do was identify - inside the program's code itself, whether the input was numeric or textual. Problem solved with some change of code, is all.

Here's how the new Options Page for the Gematria Method looks like now. Note how the 3rd set of options on this page has been bypassed.

User can now enter EITHER text OR a number in the same field
With this significant change in place, app creation will probably be rather simple.

These changes, in fact, relieved the size of the download by more than 20K bytes.

Inasmuch as this new version is to expedite navigation to a working app, the previous version remains deployed as the version in production.