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Read more about the article Creating an Infobox for Mobile View Using Angular in Susper

Creating an Infobox for Mobile View Using Angular in Susper

In Susper, the Information and Analytics boxes disappeared for widths smaller than 1100px, since they were too big to fit in the existing page layout.
In Laptop view:

In Mobile view:

Hence we decided to design a new Info-cum-Analytics box for mobile devices, where the Analytics are displayed only if the ‘Show Analytics’ button is clicked and they are hidden on clicking the ‘Hide Analytics’ button.

The following is the html code for the Infobox:

<div class=“combo-box”>
<app–infobox></app-infobox>
<button class=“btn” id=“toggle-button” (click)=“BoxToggle()” type=“button” data–toggle=“collapse” data–target=“#statbox” aria–expanded=“false” aria–controls=“collapseExample”>
{{boxMessage}} Analytics
</button>
<app–statsbox class=“collapse” id=“statbox”></app-statsbox>
</div>

We can make the following observations:

  • The combo box has both the Info and the Stats box, in addition to a button, which toggles the display status of the Analytics box.
  • To display the appropriate message on the button, we have a special function called BoxToggle() which sets the value of boxMessage()
  • The data-toggle attribute of the button has been set to collapse and the data-target is statbox
  • The statsbox has the class collapse, so that it collapses on clicking on the Toggle button.

The typescript code is as follows:

BoxToggle() {
if (this.boxMessage === ‘Show’) {
this.boxMessage = ‘Hide’;
} else {
this.boxMessage = ‘Show’;
}
}

This code thus effectively toggles between the messages Show and Hide, if the button is clicked when the message says Show, it changes to Hide and vice-versa

The CSS code:

@media screen and (min-width:768px) {
div.combo-box {
display: none;
}
}

The css code ensures that this combo-box is displayed only for widths less than 768px (only mobile and tablet screens).

To view the entire code you can check results.component.html and results.component.css in the Susper repository.

References

  1. W3 Schools for Collapsible buttons and their implementation: https://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap/bootstrap_collapse.asp
  2. Official Bootstrap documentation for collapsible buttons: https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/collapse/
Continue ReadingCreating an Infobox for Mobile View Using Angular in Susper
Read more about the article Writing Browser Specific CSS for Susper in Angular

Writing Browser Specific CSS for Susper in Angular

In Susper, we were facing a unique problem for Information box and Analytics box alignment.
At a width of around 1290 px, the boxes fit perfectly in Firefox as shown:

However, they were slipping to the next line in Google Chrome browsers for the same dimension(1290 px)

The solution to this issue was to write browser-specific CSS.
The two most commonly used browser specific tags are

  1. @-moz-document url-prefix() { }: This tag is used to target the Mozilla Firefox browser in particular. Anything written within the curly braces will not apply to any other browser.
  2. @media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) { }: This tag is used to target all browsers that support webkit such as Chrome, Safari etc.

For our problem, we need to use @media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) { }
This was how the code was written for both the components (Information box and Analytics box). Please refer to infobox.component.css and statsbox.component.css for the entire code.

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
@media screen and (max-width: 1300px) {
.card {
width: 366px;
}
}
}
@media screen and (max-width: 1280px) {
.card {
width: 366px;
}

As a result of this snippet of code, we see the following effects:

  • In Chrome, the boxes change to a smaller width at 1300px itself, thus preventing it from slipping to the next line
  • In Firefox, the boxes change to a smaller width only at 1280px, and not at 1300px, thus achieving the exact design we envisioned.

This is how the display finally looks in Chrome:

References:

  1. Stack overflow on specific CSS tags for Chrome: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9328832/how-to-apply-specific-css-rules-to-chrome-only
  2. Stack overflow on specific CSS tags for Firefox: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/952861/targeting-only-firefox-with-css
Continue ReadingWriting Browser Specific CSS for Susper in Angular
Read more about the article Firefox Customization for Meilix

Firefox Customization for Meilix

Meilix a lightweight operating system can be easily customized. This article talks about the way one must proceed to customize the configuration of Firefox of Meilix or on its own Linux distro and how to copy the configuration file of Firefox directly to the home folder of the user.
Meilix script contains a pref.js file which is responsible for providing the configuration. This file contains various function through which one can edit them according to its need to get the required configuration of its need.

Let’s see an example:

user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=partner-pub-6065445074637525:8941524350");

This line is used to set the browser startup page and it can be edited according to user choice to find the same page whenever he starts his Firefox.

There are several lines too which can be edited to make the required changes.

How does this work?

This is the Mozilla User Preference file and should be placed in the location /home/user_name/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/prefs.js. It actually controls the attributes of Firefox preference and set the command from here to change it.

How to use it?

One can directly go and edit it according to the choice to use it.

How meilix script uses it to change the user preference?

As we can see that .mozilla folder should be under the home directory, therefore we copy the .mozilla to the the skel folder, so that it gets automatically copied to the home location and we would be able to use.
There is also a shell script which comes in handy to implement the browser startup page and the script even copies the configuration file.

1.#!/bin/bash

2.# firefox
3.# http://askubuntu.com/questions/73474/how-to-install-firefox-addon-from-command-line-in-scripts
4.for user_name in `ls /home/`
5.do
  6.preferences_file="`echo /home/$user_name/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/prefs.js`"
  7.if [ -f "$preferences_file" ]
  8.then
    9.echo "user_pref(\"browser.startup.homepage\", \"https://google.com/\");" >> $preferences_file
  10.fi
11.done

This file is taken from here. And it used in Meilix to run the script to set the default startup page in Firefox. This will be taken input from the user end from the Meilix Generator webapp and it will change the line 9 url according to the input given by the user.
On line 3, *.default will set automatically by the script itself, it generated randomly.
After that, the script will copy the prefs.js in its location and it will implement the changes.

Links to follow:

Firefox-preference guide
Firefox-editing-configuration

Continue ReadingFirefox Customization for Meilix