Author: Nic Raboy

Upcoming Presentation: Phoenix Mobile Festival

September 12, 2015 Nic Raboy

In case I’m in your part of the world, I’ll be giving a talk at the Phoenix Mobile Festival in Phoenix, Arizona on September 19th, 2015. I encourage you to attend or at least swing by and say hello.

The title of my talk is Building Offline First Mobile Applications and the abstract is as follows:

What happens when your mobile device does not have a network connection? That device will have no content, no experience and the amazing application that you spent so much effort to build just simply will not work.

You will gain knowledge in NoSQL databases technologies and walk away with insights on how to create offline type of applications that to sync to the cloud with Couchbase Mobile.

This is a free event, so if you’re available and are interested in learning about mobile technologies, mark it on your calendar. Based on the listed agenda there are going to be a lot of fun topics.

Make HTTP Requests In iOS With React Native

September 7, 2015 Nic Raboy

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, you’ll know I did an article for doing HTTP requests with Ionic Framework. Since I’ve been playing around with React Native a lot lately, I figured it is probably a good idea to figure out how to do RESTful HTTP requests sooner than later since everything has an API back-end now.

The Facebook documentation for React Native has (or had at the time of writing this) a tutorial for getting movie data from a remote API. However, it hardly explained how to customize the HTTP request. In fact, I found that a lot of the internet was missing clear cut documentation for RESTful requests with React.

This article should clear things up!

Saving Data In Your React Native Mobile Application

September 3, 2015 Nic Raboy

So you’ve been fiddling with React Native for a bit now like I have. If you’re like me then you’re at a point where you’re ready to look at saving and loading data in your mobile application.

Now I’ve previously demonstrated saving data with Ionic Framework, so the goals I’m about to share are going to be very similar. We’re going to focus on React Native’s AsyncStorage class to accomplish what we need.

Blacklist Malicious Bots And Crawlers From WordPress

August 31, 2015 Nic Raboy

The internet can be an awful place sometimes. Let’s say you created a website or blog with WordPress that recently became popular and are now getting a ton of traffic. If it hasn’t happened already, you’re going to get a lot of bad traffic mixed in. By bad traffic I mean bots and crawlers that probably don’t benefit your WordPress site because it isn’t real human traffic or well established search engine crawlers.

There are a few good ways to blacklist these bad and potentially malicious bots and crawlers from even accessing your WordPress site. We’re going to take a look at how to do this through the Apache .htaccess file.

Internationalization And Localization In Your React Native App

August 24, 2015 Nic Raboy

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog and tutorials, you’ll know that I’ve done quite a few posts on Ionic Framework. I’ve been hearing a lot about React Native lately so I figured it is time to give it a shot.

There are 6,500 languages and roughly seven billion people in the world. Chances are your native language is only known by a small piece of the global population. You can boost downloads of your application and overall App Store Optimization (ASO) by accommodating a larger variety of languages.

Last year, I did a tutorial regarding localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n) in an Ionic Framework Android and iOS application. This time I’m going to go over the same, but in a React Native application for iOS.

AngularJS Form Validation In Your Ionic Framework App

August 17, 2015 Nic Raboy

When developing mobile Android and iOS applications, the user experience is often more important than what your application actually offers.

A quick and very easy enhancement you can implement in your application is in the realm of form validation. Best practice says that you should always validate user inputted data via the back-end and I agree. However, by validating via the front-end as well, it can make improvements to your user experience.

Validating your Ionic Framework forms with HTML5 validators, however, is a terrible idea. It will make your user experience worse that if you had left them out. Instead, AngularJS ships with its own validators that work great in Ionic Framework mobile apps.

Using Charts In Your Ionic Framework Mobile App

August 10, 2015 Nic Raboy

I’m always trying to add more flair to the mobile applications that I develop whether it be through slick user interfaces or graphics. For a while now I’ve wanted to mess around with charts in my mobile applications, but it kept getting pushed to my development back-burner.

I decided to push myself to give it a shot. Using Ionic Framework to build mobile Android and iOS applications, you’re left with a few possibilities for adding charts because so many JavaScript libraries exist. In particular, we’re going to take a look at Chart.js and the AngularJS wrapper, Angular Chart. We’re going to look at this library because not only does it look great, but it plays nice with AngularJS which is what Ionic Framework is built upon.