Web and WebWorks Development

[alexperri7]

I already had it set to that. Doesn't do anything differently. The question I still have that no one seems to be answering is should it look the way it does in Ripple (which to me looks better) or should it look the way it has rendered on the phone?

[tneil]

Well the phone is what it is going to look like on an actual device, so Ripple needs to render in the same way.

[ChristoDeluxe]

I agree that the Ripple tool will not work well for people unless it can correctly render to match the device DPI and other layout tricks specific to the mobile renderer.

If you browse random web sites, you can clearly see that Ripple is not matching the device's behaviour at all, just try www.rim.com for instance.

Since Ripple originates as a Chrome extension, it seems to just use the Chrome desktop rendering engine.  it's WebKit, so it's awfully close sometimes, but that's even more deceptive because people may be tempted to believe that they've tested enough on this.  Apple's iPhone Simulator has a port of the mobile renderer inside it, so the Safari in there (and the UIWebView component) is a pixel-perfect rendering copy of what you see on a matching device.

I tried adding the target-densitydpi=device-dpi to my meta viewport tag, but this doesn't change things for me.

[interfaSys]

Still an issue in 2013.

Will it ever be fixed?

[ChristoDeluxe]

I don't expect this to ever really change, since the product transitioned to a Chrome plugin.  I've checked a couple of releases since I started this discussion, and nothing has improved.  The fact it runs in Chrome means it's using desktop Chrome's web rendering engine, which is not the same WebKit as a BlackBerry device.

I guess the Ripple tools helps with other aspects of development, but it simply does not render pages using the same engine as devices use.

For BB10, the alpha dev tools included a simulator including the device's browser app -- I assume the final dev tools are the same way?  This doesn't help for older devices -- I've never been able to get BB5/6/7 device emulators to work with a web browser, and they're not available for Mac at all.

[interfaSys]

My editor of choice, WebStorm, allows me to live edit code in Chrome while the app is running, so I figured I could load Ripple as well to test behaviours in real time, but the picture of the phone in Ripple is huge, while the content stays tiny. I'd rather have a resized Chrome window unless I quickly need to test BB10 events, but it's a shame because it seems to me that the viewport could be manipulated to make it fit the device mask and make apps look as if they were running on the device. It wouldn't solve some of the issues you've mentioned regarding the browser engine itself, but would still improve the overall experience.