The Last Straw

[mark_anderson_us]

When i got started with HS about 3 years ago, the iPad mini wasn't out. A regular iPad was about $500 + $100+ for a mount (and I didn't want such a big screen wall mounted in all rooms). the kindle fire came out at $199 and was a great opportunity to put a screen in every room for $200/room. I fought with all the alignment issues (that I didn't have on my iPad and iPhone). I chalked to up Android.

Recently Target had new iPad mini's (non retina) for $199 so I picked some up to replace the kindles. So I made my home screen in HSTouch and deployed to iPad:

Below is what I see in desinger vs ipad. I'm using Verdana, which is a font on iPad. WTF? How can it be so bad. Looks like it's full steam ahead with Indigo

[mfisher]

Yes, unfortunately the HSTouch designer is only sort of a WYSIWYG design tool, and in my experience a lot of manual tweaking is required to get things to display correctly on any client other than Windows.

From the images you posted it appears that font scaling is the issue. The fonts on your iPad are being displayed larger than you expect and the lines of text are wrapping. You can see this if you draw an imaginary vertical line from the "F" of Fri (in the header), down to the end of the first full line (Ukrane extends...) Notice on the designer screenshot how the word 'east' ends before that imaginary line, but on the iPad it ends after the line? This means the iPad is rendering the fonts slightly larger than the designer.

Here's how to resolve this:
1) On each iPad client, verify that the setting for "Font Scaling" is set to use "Project scaling" (value of zero)
2) In the designer, go to the menu item 'Tools' -> 'Options' -> 'Project Defaults'
3) Change the 'Scale Fonts (%)' to a slightly smaller number - maybe try 0.95 first. This should result in a 5% smaller font on the client while leaving the designer display as is.
4) Deploy the project and verify that the font size has become smaller.
5) Continue adjusting the scale and deploying until it is correct.

Note that the scale factor applies to all screens in the project so you only do have to this once.

[mark_anderson_us]

Yes, unfortunately the HSTouch designer is only sort of a WYSIWYG design tool, and in my experience a lot of manual tweaking is required to get things to display correctly on any client other than Windows.

From the images you posted it appears that font scaling is the issue. The fonts on your iPad are being displayed larger than you expect and the lines of text are wrapping. You can see this if you draw an imaginary vertical line from the "F" of Fri (in the header), down to the end of the first full line (Ukrane extends...) Notice on the designer screenshot how the word 'east' ends before that imaginary line, but on the iPad it ends after the line? This means the iPad is rendering the fonts slightly larger than the designer.

Here's how to resolve this:
1) On each iPad client, verify that the setting for "Font Scaling" is set to use "Project scaling" (value of zero)
2) In the designer, go to the menu item 'Tools' -> 'Options' -> 'Project Defaults'
3) Change the 'Scale Fonts (%)' to a slightly smaller number - maybe try 0.95 first. This should result in a 5% smaller font on the client while leaving the designer display as is.
4) Deploy the project and verify that the font size has become smaller.
5) Continue adjusting the scale and deploying until it is correct.

Note that the scale factor applies to all screens in the project so you only do have to this once.

Thanks for reply

Will give it a try. However this means there;s no way I can use the same template for two devices if they need different font-scaling (more duplication)

[mark_anderson_us]

Well I switched to Arial and everything is OK except the weather forecast text. Single line text does not align to top of box even though it's set for top center.
Why the difference? I thought these were both native fonts on iOS:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5878?v...S&locale=en_US

Can someone from HS explain why there is such a massive difference in font handling in HSTouch on iOS?

[mark_anderson_us]

Spent about 10 hours in HS Touch Designer today.

REALLY glad I switched to iPad minis, so much faster and I can launch native apps like Sonopad (which is great). (Shame HS doesn't support the ability to return.) At $199 each new, they're unbeatable.

Anyway with Arial, everything I did (about 10 screens) is perfect. it's such a breath of fresh air after fighting massive alignment issues with Droid.

I really wish someone could explain why some (iOS native) fonts work perfectly and others don't.

Regards

Mark

[kideon]

are you launching apps on the iOS device from hstouch? couldn't figure that one out

[mrhappy]

...I really wish someone could explain why some (iOS native) fonts work perfectly and others don't.

When the iOS client was first released I remember battling with this, HSTouch seems to determine whether or not a font used in a project is installed on the client. If it is then it does not care, if not then it tries to substitute a like font and I have always thought that the programming here was a bit patchy. I do wonder where this substitution is taking place as if it is taking place on the designer at deployment as there are quite a few more fonts on iOS7 than there were on iOS4 or whichever version was out when the first touch client was released. If it is taking place at deployment then I wonder if it has ever been updated for the newer fonts.

[kideon]

App launch

So I saw how the Sonos app launch works can that be done on any app?

[mark_anderson_us]

Most apps (except HS). To test, go to safari and type <appname>://

e.g. yelp://

[mrhappy]

Interesting...not sure I have a use for it but the structure appears to be the same of OpenURL's http://handleopenurl.com/ so a number of applications should be supported.

[mark_anderson_us]

Here's some details:

https://developer.apple.com/library/...roduction.html

and here. Seems like minor change to the app. Would be good if HS supported it:

http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/la...rl-scheme.html