Need for better permission policy for HTML5 app
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There are many good HTML5 apps for ubuntu touch. Examples I use daily are: Turtl UT and LoquiIM, but I am sure there are more. But they have a great limitation in their functionalities: they can't export data to the internal storage. For example in Loqui when someone send me a media I can't save it in the gallery, same for Turtl or any HTML5 app. A good solution is to make a new permission option, like camera, microphone or position access, capable of enable content-hub export access like normal apps.
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@Emanuele-Sorce, I believe, Cordova might be what you are looking for. The framework has APIs for HTML5 apps to access internal storage, camera and geolocation. There are number of other useful plugins available for Ubuntu in their repo.
Content-hub is also available for HTML5 apps.
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@mikhael
Cordova uses very old components, and as far as I read who tried to use Cordova to create HTML5 app found problems, and in most cases headed back to standard HTML5 template app. HTML5 apps can use content-hub to import files, but not to export them. -
@Emanuele-Sorce, I agree, most of problems, I'm facing with in Cordova while updating Seabass, are also due to outdated components and unsupported build tools.
But, I think, except those issues, Cordova has some nice features, such as cross-platform availability (which is a good selling point for going with HTML5 instead of native apps, in my opinion) and a good plugin-based architecture with simple command line tool for creating/managing apps (no need to study platform-specific SDK's for developers). When year ago build tools were just working it was really easy to create Cordova-based apps for Ubuntu.
Maybe what we need is to just keep Ubuntu's components for Cordova updated?
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Not sure, since I never studied how web apps got integrated in the Ubuntu Touch platform, but ContentHub should be available for exporting files through the Download Manager.
Now, I don't know how this happens with the official web container, but I guess it should be easily fixable by writing a custom container using QML (see e.g. ogra's web container).
In a long term, we might want to improve the whole webapp development experience, e.g. providing some more powerful tool
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Cordova works worse with files from my point of experience. It's also a pitty, if you'd need such a rewrite of the html5 app. So there's a need to procreed oxide-qt or an implentation of a routine which makes a barrierfree handle with files possible.
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Yeah, this needs definitely some improvement. App development (not only for webapps) is held back by not recieving enough attention for too long making it way to difficult to deliver great applications at the moment. My respect to everyone who is developing anyways, there are some great apps on Ubuntu Touch!
If you have wishes or ideas how to improve the problems, be sure to speak up.
