Add Touch ID Authentication To Your Ionic Framework App

I recently picked up an iPad Air 2 to replace my ancient Android tablet. My first serious iOS device since my iPod Touch. A feature that I’m really growing to love on my iPad Air 2 is the touch id functionality for signing into the device and various applications.

How do we incorporate this touch id functionality into our own iOS applications? More importantly, how do we do this in Ionic Framework? It is not difficult, because we’re lucky to have an Apache Cordova plugin called cordova-plugin-touchid by Lee Crossley that does the work for us.

Using A Pin Dialog In Your Ionic Framework Mobile App

One of my Twitter followers recently asked me how to properly use a pin dialog in their Ionic Framework mobile application. Although I’ve already created a similar article regarding creating a pin unlock screen in an Ionic Framework application, I figured it might be a good idea to show how to do this with an actual dialog instead.

Using the Apache Cordova PinDialog plugin by Paldom we can use native dialogs in our application and accept passwords.

Modify The Badge Number Of An Ionic Framework App

Previously I did a post on Simon Reimler’s blog regarding local notifications with Ionic Framework. However, there is a different kind of notification you can use in your application. In iOS and many different flavors of Android (not all), you have the opportunity to use badge indicators on your launcher icon. Although this doesn’t notify users with a prompt, it will still notify them on their home screen that something needs their attention.

There is a nifty Apache Cordova plugin created by Sebastián Katzer called cordova-plugin-badge that will allow us to easily add this functionality to our Ionic Framework mobile applications.

Monitor Device Battery Status Using Ionic Framework

So you’re making a mobile app using Ionic Framework and you care about the experience your users receive? Maybe you want to control the functionality of certain features based on how much battery the users device has left.

An example of this is, maybe you have your application pulling remote data while the application is open. Maybe you’ve decided that if your users battery is less than 30% you want the user to have to pull-to-refresh in order to preserve battery life.

This kind of battery monitoring can be performed through the cordova-plugin-battery-status plugin by Apache Cordova.

Whitelist External Resources For Use In Ionic Framework

It was recently brought to my attention that big things came with the latest Apache Cordova Android and iOS update. One of the major updates being the requirement of whitelisting in order to use external resources.

What exactly does this mean?

Take the example of some random API like Facebook or TinyURL. If you try to perform a request on either of these APIs it will fail because by default everything external is blacklisted. By adding to the whitelist, things change.

Adding Background Images To Ionic Framework Apps

I started working on an app and decided it was time to step up my design game. Usually my apps suffer from looking plain or dated even though they have some insanely awesome functionality (ex: OTP Safe). However, after looking at many other apps, I came to the conclusion that an app can look more attractive just by including a logo or some other kind of branding images.

The tricky part here is, how might you add images to your Ionic Framework application and have them look good across devices with multiple screen densities? After doing some research I found that this could easily be accomplished by using background images created with CSS.

Use Parse Core In Your Ionic Framework Mobile Apps

It is time I talk about another cloud data storage option for Ionic Framework. Previously I had shown how to use the Dropbox Datastore API, Firebase, and PouchDB to store information remotely.

This time I am going to discuss how to store data using Parse, a Facebook company, and retrieve data from the cloud.