Lost and Confused, looking to pay someone to help.

[Gary_S_1]

Greetings XDK Developers,

Our app is old in terms of development environment. It started way back before Intel XDK with AppMobi. I've worked with a client for years now and we were talking about hybrid development. Hey, we're web developers and these are web technologies, we can probably put something together. That was a dumb idea of mine. After Intel got AppMobi, a lot of that stopped working properly and we converted to the XDK 2.0 framework as best as possible.

It was all working relatively well considering how simple the app was, but for some time now (since Android 4.x ish) the audio doesn't work because its HTML5 audio. In the old forums I looked and they all say to use Cordova media now. I've tested all the demo plugins that come with XDK and none of the audio player samples work on my Galaxy Note 3 Android 4.4 so I'm at a loss.

I've hired 3 different people from oDesk with supposed hybrid mobile expertise, but it seems no one uses or knows about the Intel XDK so getting expertise on this has been difficult.

The app itself is so stupid basic, we wall off access behind a login screen that connects to our Wordpress Membership database. If the user is active it logs them in and voila. Its 3 sections that play audio from an Amazon S3 bucket and thats it. We've wanted to do more but we haven't been able to keep the functions we currently have working and updated at the same time for iOs and Android.

I would love for anyone that would be able to take what we have now as basic as it is and make it work on the newest XDK framework with Cordova so I could actually hear audio from the app. Thats all I'm after, I just want to make it functional since currently our Android users just can't do anything with it.

Thanks,
Gary

[John_H_Intel2]

What is the name of your app?

Can you post a simple app (or the whole thing) that contains the functionality that you are having issues with?

[PaulF_IntelCorp]

This test app uses the Cordova media plugin, you can check it out to see how it works > https://github.com/xmnboy/hello-cordova

Also, there are some low-latency audio plugins that also may work for you:

-- https://github.com/SidneyS/cordova-plugin-nativeaudio
-- https://github.com/floatinghotpot/cordova-plugin-lowlatencyaudio

Additionally, try using Crosswalk if you are building for Android.

[Tony_B_]

I've been struggling with playing audio files for some time now and had innumerable problems, many of which were of my own making - I didn't know what I didn't know.

May I also suggest you upgrade to App Framework 2.1 and check you have the current version of jQuery if you're using it. This fixed most of my problems although I still have a problem I've been struggling with for 3 weeks now, when I copy an element to a search results page the sound doesn't play, even though it plays in the original page.

It really shouldn't be this difficult for reasonably competent developers to make simple tasks work. The XDK forum and Intel support have been extremely helpful to me but their availability is limited.

Tony

[Gary_S_1]

@John

- I'm building the new version or to test under my app center id. The one launched is under the client's app center information.

@Paul

- I have downloaded this Hello Cordova, loaded it into the XDK, created a build for Android (not crosswalk). Downloaded it onto my Galaxy Note 3 and some of the sounds do work. Which is odd, because the build from WITHIN the XDK did not work. So I'm going to try to replicate the functionality found in Hello Cordova into my own app and see where that gets me Thanks.

@Tony

- App development is a nightmare, something I'll not be continuing in, there are too many different devices running different branches of different software and versions, compatibility is dreadful. Its just this client I've worked with for years and I want to make sure at least the current very low feature app works for all the users.

[John_H_Intel2]

Gary ~

I had another user request info on connecting an app to a wordpress database. Would you be able to create a simplified app that allows a user to register/login to a wordpress database? :)

[Gary_S_1]

Hey John,

I'm right now rebuilding the app trying to use the XDK Editor as much as possible, its clunky going from code to design and back but I want to use all of the functions of the XDK so I can make sure this is going to properly work. Or at least I hope, there are lots of cool things they wanted to do with the App, but I've wasted massive amounts of time trying to figure out how to get X and / or Z to work on all operating systems and thus far I've not been able to.

In relation to what your user wants, its not a simple thing to remotely register and login or at least it wasn't when we first built it. Perhaps there are now some tools that could be used, but you'd still have to use JSON and Ajax and need to build your own api with which to talk to wordpress at the installation itself. There are some open source options for JSON to connect with Wordpress login, but only login.

We built our own API file for the app to talk to and we pass the username / password via JSON. If you want to bypass Wordpress' security, you could just write a file that connects directly to the database, but that would be ignorant. Make use of Wordpress' functions so its still making use of its SALT and HMAC hash during authentication.

However, since we're having to use our own api file and send that information from the app to the file its not a secure solution, you'd need to harden that file on the server and make some exceptions for the app if possible. Now I'm not a mobile guru, I dont' know how risky it is to end a password through an app, there might be lots of ways to harden it. For us though, security of the file itself is not a huge problem because it merely hooks into Wordpress' functions and we don't let the user interact with Wordpress in any way through the app. The Wordpress site itself is a membership site, and this login merely validates that the user status is "active".

Your user might be interested in something like: https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/wp_authenticate but its ONLY for authentication, to actually "login" and interact with Wordpress thats something else entirely.

All that being said, I've had tons of trouble trying to work from Appmobi to App Framework 2.0 to Phonegap back to App Framework and now App Framework 2.2 with Cordova. I've had versions where it worked on Android and not on iOS and now I've got a version working on iOS but not Android. There is no value for me building apps, this is something I agreed to look into 2 years ago for a long-time client and now I've committed myself but outside of this, I've no real desire to do any in a commercial or charitable sense.

My goal is only to get a fully working version across both iOS and Android for this client and be done with it, and I haven't even gotten there yet. App development is not something I want to focus on in the future.

Thanks,
Gary

[Michael_O_]

Dear Gary,

I am a seasoned app developer with close to 10 apps on Google play,Amazon store,Opera Mobile Store and Windows Store.

My brand name is inspirati.

You can send me a mail at enquiries@globalinspirati.com with the full scope of your project.