Support iBeacons In Your Ionic Framework Mobile App

I recently picked up some Estimote iBeacons to play around with and figured I’d try to get them working in an Ionic Framework Android and iOS application.

If you’re unfamiliar with iBeacons, they are small bluetooth proximity devices. There are many different manufacturers, but Estimote appears to have the best advertised battery life and durability. iBeacons generally broadcast a signal every 100ms to 1000ms depending on the configuration or brand. The broadcast signal contains a UUID and two numeric identifiers which are a major and minor version.

Before I get into the code I’ll share a few possible use cases for iBeacons:

1. Triggering some literature or audio when your device detects that you’re near a particular iBeacon in a museum. Put one near The Statue of David in Italy and bam, you could have information about it when you approach it.
2. Tracking foot traffic in your store. Maybe you have a large store like Walmart with iBeacons in every department. You can see which department gets the most traffic.
3. Calculating how long time-wise a queue / line is for a particular ride at an amusement park based on device to beacon discovery.

There are endless other useful scenarios.

Upcoming Presentation: Phoenix Mobile Festival

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

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

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

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

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

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.