Having spent too much time trying to 'save development time' I found it is easier and better to program different apps for the various devices.

Less time spent in both development and maintenance and more device specific user experience.

Doug,

<< Any way to have this an application-level choice? >>

No, doing so would prevent much of the UI element state transition functionality from working correctly in touch environments.  In other words, the user would touch a button and nothing would happen visually.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Frederick,

<< I was thinking about scrollbars that sprout when I resize the web browser's height and/or width as the EWB app becomes larger than the web browser's size. >>

That's controlled by the Application.ViewPort.OverflowX/Y properties.  You'll notice that many of the examples included with EWB have fixed form/surface sizes, and use vertical scrolling.  They do so like this:

procedure TMainForm.MainFormCreate(Sender: TObject);
begin
  Application.ViewPort.OverflowY:=otAuto;
  with Application.Surface do
     begin
     Constraints.Min.Height:=(Self.Height+40);
     Background.Fill.Color:=clElevateFillGray;
     end;
end;

Effectively, they set the minimum allowed Application.Surface height to slightly larger than the main form, and turn on the vertical scrollbars for the application viewport.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Frederick,

<< I think in reality, a typical desktop application would not be suitable for a smartphone in terms of design because of the number of controls present. >>

Correct.  It's just not a good idea to try to squeeze desktop interfaces as-is into a phone's form factor.  However, you *can* do things to mitigate the amount of pain involved with targeting multiple form factors, such as breaking forms up into smaller sub-forms, and then parenting the smaller sub-forms into a larger form for desktop/tablet, or keeping them as multiple forms for phones.  As long as you use the Layout.Overflow properties for these sub-forms properly, they will automatically organize vertically as the width of the browser viewport decreases in size, like the responsive layout example shows:

http://www.elevatesoft.com:8081/responsive/responsive.html

The only painful part when you use sub-forms/parenting is the dataset handling, primarily because EWB doesn't support hooking up datasets across forms yet.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Douglas,

> Here is what I am looking for.  Take a user that uses the web app mostly on the desktop but wants occasional access from their iPad.  With EWB1, they could hold the iPad in landscape - so that the keyboard could be displayed with the full content of the app also displayed.  The app could be zoomed out to accommodate this.  This is important functionality that has been lost in EWB2.

Many apps and websites consist of different versions for mobile phones
and desktop / tablets. As Tim indicated, you'd have to split large forms
into several small forms and create a responsive design.

Have a look here (same app, 2 versions, nearly same code, but different
layouts - not much work with EWB 2).

http://beckersoft-online.de/demos/tablet1.jpg
http://beckersoft-online.de/demos/tablet2.jpg
http://beckersoft-online.de/demos/tablet3.jpg
http://beckersoft-online.de/demos/phone1.jpg
http://beckersoft-online.de/demos/phone2.jpg
http://beckersoft-online.de/demos/phone3.jpg
http://beckersoft-online.de/demos/phone4.jpg

Regards Uli

Uli,

<< Have a look here (same app, 2 versions, nearly same code, but different layouts - not much work with EWB 2). >>

Wow, nice, as always.

Care to have that app made into a blog post/example project ?

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Tim,

> Wow, nice, as always.

Thanks, but it's just EWB 2. Just amazing to work with it.

> Care to have that app made into a blog post/example project ?

No, not at all.

Actually this is a Delphi application which allows to collect all sort
of information. It's main purpose is to store scanned documents, but
also allows to add text and files to the database (EDB of course, what
else ).

From my local computers the database is replicated.

The online app does not allow to add or change anything though (at least
for the moment) and scanning might be not feasible at all. It's just a
"look up" app. To display the scanned documents a module for EWBServer
was written, which loads the matching data from the database and stores
them as jpg-files.

Uli

Uli,

<< Actually this is a Delphi application which allows to collect all sort of information. It's main purpose is to store scanned documents, but also allows to add text and files to the database (EDB of course, what else ).

From my local computers the database is replicated.

The online app does not allow to add or change anything though (at least for the moment) and scanning might be not feasible at all. It's just a "look up" app. To display the scanned documents a module for EWBServer was written, which loads the matching data from the database and stores them as jpg-files. >>

Nice.  If you want to send it over, I'll do the rest.  Or, I could set you up via FTP, like before.

Thanks,

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Uli,

<< Thanks, but it's just EWB 2. Just amazing to work with it. >>

I skipped this part....yeah, but your interface modifications are much nicer than the default interfaces.  It's something about the color combinations that you use.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com