Add Glyph Icons To Your React Native Mobile App

Out of the box mobile platforms, and even React Native for that matter, don’t ship with a very large selection of icons. If we’ve chosen to use React Native as our development framework then we’re lucky that there is a great component that can be added to give us thousands of icons for use in our application.

Previously I wrote about how to use Font Awesome in an Ionic Framework and native Android applications. This time we’re going to see the same using React Native and the react-native-icons component by Cory Smith.

Use The iOS Camera In Your React Native Mobile App

In many mobile applications it is essential to be able to use the device camera. Maybe you’re creating the next Instagram or other photo sharing application.

Previously I wrote how to use the device camera in Ionic Framework, but how might we do the same with React Native?

Lucky for us, with React Native, there is an external component that lets us use the camera. Using react-native-camera by Loch Wansbrough, we have access to both the front and back device camera.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Use RegEx To Analyze Credit Card Numbers In JavaScript

RegEx is a powerful beast. Previously I wrote how to test password strength using JavaScript and regular expressions. This time we’ll take a look at how to check credit card providers based on the credit card number entered. No, this won’t test if a credit card number is legitimate, but it will test if it was entered correctly.