iPad question

[Andee Rubin]

A teacher in a workshop in Puerto Rico noticed that the menu item “open in draw tool” on the “snapshot” menu is grayed out on her iPad.  I assume this is because there isn’t the equivalent draw tool on an iPad?  Could you confirm?  And also let me know what other iPad issues I should be on the lookout for here in the workshop (we have 3 more days…)

Andee

[Bill Finzer]

Hello Andee,

Thanks for reporting that the “Open in Draw Tool” option is grayed out when CODAP is running on an iPad. I just verified that you are correct, but it can’t be because the draw tool doesn’t run on an iPad because you can open it from the Plugins menu and it works fine! Investigation is required!

There are quite a number of “small” things that don’t work well or at all on iPads, but I don’t have a comprehensive list. Just to give one example: On desktop you can click and scroll in a case table to select a range of cases, but this doesn’t work on an iPad.

The most glaring difference, I think, is that on touch devices you mostly get get the “mouse hover” tips. One place you can however is by “touch and hold” on an an attribute name in a case table—this brings up the attribute description.

Sorry I can’t provide a complete list.

Good luck with your workshop!

Bill

[Andee Rubin]

Could you let me know when you figure out the issue?  There’s a teacher here in PR who would like to know.

If I open it from the plug-ins menu, is there an easy way to to get the graph into the draw tool?

[Bill Finzer]

I looked in the code and discovered that the issue does not have to do with iPad. It has to do with CODAP running in the Safari browser. There was a time when Safari would not allow CODAP to transfer data to the Draw Tool plugin for security reasons and that was why we disabled the menu item. (The iPad uses the Safari browser, of course, or, more specifically, the underlying WebKit technology.)

But I just discovered that if I enable the menu item, it now appears that the transfer works both in desktop safari and on the iPad! But with a bug, namely that you have to resize the Draw Tool component to actually see the transferred image. So, bottom line, I’ll enable the menu item and see about fixing the bug.

Thanks for asking about this and pushing me to investigate further.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

And, to answer your question about getting a copy of the graph into the Draw Tool, I discovered a cumbersome method:

1. Choose Export Image in the graph’s camera menu.
2. Download as a local file.
3. Split the iPad screen with the browser occupying half the screen.
4. Open the Draw Tool in CODAP.
5. In the other half of the screen show the Files app.
6. Navigate in the Files app to find the downloaded image and drag it on top of the Draw Tool.
7. Resize the Draw Tool slightly to force the image to display.

Ugh. Not really a viable method!

[Andee Rubin]

Thank you for all this input!  Given the level of sophistication of the teachers here (and my lack of fluency in Spanish), I don’t think I’ll try to convey that method.  But I will tell them that soon the menu item will be available on iPad…would that be in the next build?

[martindavina719@gmail.com]

Hello Everyone, Thanks for sharing information…

[Bill Finzer]

Hello,

Now, in the latest CODAP release you can bring an image of a graph into the Draw Tool on an iPad and in Safari. There is one caveat.

• After exporting the graph to the draw tool you must resize the draw tool slightly to force the image to display.

Hopefully we’ll figure out how to fix this bug soon.

Happy annotating!

Bill

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