Recently, I published a tutorial on using ThreeJS with Ionic to embed virtual reality content into a mobile application using WebVR. This tutorial is going to be somewhat similar, we will still be making use of ThreeJS and WebGL, but we will be creating an augmented reality experience in an Ionic/Angular application. If you are […]
Using BehaviorSubject to Handle Asynchronous Loading in Ionic
It is common in Ionic applications (and Angular applications more broadly) to create some kind of service to handle loading data from some source. This might be from a local JSON file, local storage, a remote database, or some other kind of data store. The idea is that the service handles any of the complexities […]
Understanding How Slots are Used in Ionic 4
As you may know by now, the big change in Ionic 4 is that all of Ionic’s components are becoming web components. Since web components are a feature of browsers, and not of specific frameworks, this will allow Ionic to work with any framework or no framework at all. The basic idea behind Ionic’s components […]
Converting Ionic 3 Push/Pop Navigation to Angular Routing in Ionic 4
Most of the changes required for upgrading from Ionic 3 to Ionic 4 are going to be simple find and replace style changes – things like changing <button> to <ion-button> and ionViewDidLoad() to ngOnInit(). Although it will look slightly different, the code that you are using in Ionic 3 will more or less look the […]
Creating a WebVR Experience in an Ionic/Angular Application
I’ve become absolutely fascinated with WebVR recently. The fact that you can access an immersive virtual reality experience powered by a web browser on your mobile phone just blows my mind. I picked up a Google Pixel 2 XL and a Google Daydream headset to experience and develop for WebVR, which provides a nice and […]
Creating a Theme Switcher Service in Ionic Using CSS4 Variables
A couple of weeks ago I released an article about how CSS4 variables would be used in Ionic 4. In that article, I discussed how using CSS4 variables for theming allows you to modify these variables at runtime because unlike SASS variables which need to be compiled, CSS4 variables are supported natively by the browser. […]
Create a PWA with Angular Service Workers in Ionic 4
I have written several articles on the topic of Progressive Web Applications (PWA) in Ionic before, including this one which provides a basic overview of the concept of PWAs and how to create one with Ionic. I would recommend reading that article if you need a little more background on what PWAs and service workers […]
My Method for Upgrading from Ionic 3 to Ionic 4
For a major version upgrade, the transition from Ionic 3 to Ionic 4 is going to be relatively minor. Most of your code will be able to remain as is, with some minor syntax changes due to the upgrade to Angular 6 and the web component approach in Ionic 4. However, this doesn’t mean that […]
Custom SVG Icons in Ionic with Ionicons
Like the rest of Ionic in Ionic 4, Ionicons has recently received the web components treatment. If you’ve used Ionic in the past, then you have likely used Ionicons which provides all of Ionic’s icons. Adding a range of well-designed and platform consistent icons is as simple as dropping the following into your project: Ionicons […]
A Primer on CSS 4 Variables for Ionic 4
Apparently, good things come in 4’s (sorry, that was the best I could do). Another significant addition to Ionic 4 is going to be support for CSS4 variables, which will now play the primary role in Ionic’s theming approach. In this article, we are going to take a brief look at what CSS4 variables are […]
Adding Icons & Splash Screens (Launch Images) to Capacitor Projects
Generating icons and splash screen images ends up being a much more difficult task than you might anticipate before doing it for the first time. The difficulty stems from the fact that there are a bunch of different devices that your application could be running on, a lot of which will have different resolutions/pixel density. […]
Faster Boot Times with Lazy Loaded Web Components in Ionic 4
In this article, we are going to take a look at a feature introduced in Ionic 4 that will reduce the initial load times of our applications. Before we get into discussing that, though, I want to highlight that when it comes to performance we can’t just rely on the framework. I published an article […]
Ionic Framework Is Fast (But Your Code Might Not Be)
I don’t want this article to come across as a self-righteous rant, or that I’m attacking people who have made statements like the ones I will use as examples in this article. The last thing I want to do is sound elitist or fan the flames of framework wars. So, I will precede this article […]
Deploying Capacitor Applications to Android (Development & Distribution)
Earlier this week, I released a guide to deploying Capacitor applications to iOS. In this tutorial, we are going to be doing the exact same thing, except we will be deploying an Android application built with Capacitor to Google Play. As was the case for the last tutorial, we are going to do this starting […]
Deploying Capacitor Applications to iOS (Development & Distribution)
In this tutorial, we are going to walk through how to use Capacitor to deploy iOS applications. We will be covering how to get a Capacitor application running on an iOS device for development, all the way through to creating a build for distribution on the App Store. We are going to do this starting […]
Creating a Tabs Layout with Angular Routing and Ionic 4
Recently, I published a tutorial that talked through how to use Angular routing in an Ionic/Angular application when Ionic 4.x is released. Although using Angular style routing is not required if you want to upgrade to Ionic 4, there are a lot of benefits to doing so (and some features that were available with standard […]
Using Cordova Plugins that Require Install Variables with Capacitor
Since Cordova is such a hugely popular framework with a massive ecosystem of plugins to access various native functionality, Capacitor is aiming to have backward compatibility with existing Cordova plugins. This means that if you are using Capacitor, you should be able to use any existing Cordova plugin with it. All you need to do […]
Prevent Access to Pages in Ionic with Angular Route Guards
In a previous tutorial, I covered how we would implement Angular routing in an Ionic 4.x application. When Ionic 4 is released, there will be more of a focus on using the baked in Angular routing, rather than Ionic’s own push/pop style routing (this style of navigation will still be available, though). In this tutorial, […]
Using the Capacitor Filesystem API to Store Photos
When we take a photo on an iOS device, the resulting file is stored inside of a temporary folder called tmp. If we use the Camera API to retrieve a photo, the resulting URI will look like this: If we are interested in long-term storage then this isn’t the best solution. The way you approach […]
Implementing a Master Detail Pattern in Ionic 4 with Angular Routing
Earlier this week, I published an article that discussed how and why you should use Angular routing with Ionic 4.x. To summarise, the main points from that article were that: Angular routing primarily relies on defining a bunch of routes that link to specific components/pages, and then using the current URL to determine which route […]
Using Angular Routing with Ionic 4
Recently, I published an article that talked through some of the expected changes for the upcoming Ionic 4.x release. Most of the changes that will be introduced are behind the scenes, and there won’t be that many changes required for updating your Ionic 3.x applications to 4.x. Ionic 4 has not officially been released yet, […]
Create Native HTML5 Games with Phaser and Capacitor
Building HTML5 games with Phaser has been somewhat of a hobby of mine over the past few years, and I’ve even written a few tutorials about Phaser with a focus on developing HTML5 games for mobile. However, despite having created a few mostly finished games most of them never actually see the light of day. […]
Stack Based Navigation (Push/Pop) with Ionic Web Components
The introduction of Stencil and Ionic 4.x has led to a much larger focus on using routes for navigation. In the past, Ionic applications relied mostly on using a navigation stack with a push/pop style of navigation. If you are unfamiliar with how this style of navigation works, I would recommend reading one of my […]
What to Expect When Ionic 4 Is Released
The Ionic team has been busy working behind the scenes to finish the release of Ionic 4.x, which we should hopefully see an alpha release of before too long. We’ve talked about the benefits of Ionic 4 in the past. In this article, I want to focus on how the release of Ionic 4 will […]