Multiple device types Sample Clauses

Multiple device types. It became clear during the development of the scenarios and during the course of the project that the ability to support mobile devices and tablets is now becoming an integral part of the project. To keep the system as flexible as possible we decided to focus on HTML5 based applications with a downscaling to HbbTV specs 1.5 and possibly 2.0 for the third year of the project [2]. But within this limitation we again feel it’s important that we can have a unified view for the developer and that the framework handles as much as possible in matching the device capabilities to our internal model. Traditionally one would use adaptive/responsive design using stylesheets to adapt to different screen sizes and browser. And we use this on the lower levels inside the HTML5 clients but we also need a more generic concept on the application level. From the applications point of view each client (mostly browsers) are just seen as screens with capabilities and this is the abstraction level we want to support. We distinguish between the following screen capabilities:  size (pixel count and physical size)  rotation (is the user holding it in landscape or portrait)  stylesheet level (what options for visual styles do we have)  passive or active (is it just a screen or also provides mouse, touch input)  keyboard support (is there a fixed or optional keyboard)  brand specific features (special buttons for example) Each of the screens works with these capabilities as almost a contract (interface) between it and the system. Communication from and to these unified screens is either handled by the framework as part of the abstraction concept (so for example if a state of a button changes in the application the framework will change it on all the screens needed) or is done manually using a simple message back to the server side of the application (Image 9). Using these methods we currently support all HTML5 based desktop browsers, android phones and tablets as well as Apple (iOS) phones and tablets. We also did some first tests with Condat in the area of HbbTV support to see if some of the basic abstraction concepts also work for the needed integration in third year.