The introduction of Stencil and the switch to web components means that you will soon be able to use Ionic with any framework you like. Previously, we have been limited to building Ionic applications with the Angular framework. I don’t use the term “limited” in any kind of negative sense, Angular is a great framework […]
Using Ionic with Any Framework (or None at All)
Last week, I released an article that discussed Stencil and the impact that it will have on the Ionic framework. The key point is that Stencil is being used to rebuild all of Ionic’s components as web components, which will remove Ionic’s dependence on Angular. This does not mean that Ionic is moving away from […]
What Is Stencil and How Will It Impact Ionic?
The Ionic team recently announced a new project called Stencil. The best way to think of Stencil is as “a tool for building modern Web Components”. Stencil has a specific style of syntax you need to use to build components: but there is a couple of important points to keep in mind. Although it looks […]
Advanced Guide to the Ionic Framework
Once you’ve got the basics of Ionic down then all you have left to learn is… everything else. It’s hard to clearly define where your time would be best spent once you are past the basics – there’s not much point in slogging through tutorial after tutorial implementing different kinds of components and plugins. Once […]
High Performance Animations in Ionic
It is a common misconception that web-based mobile applications like those built with Ionic are not capable of creating performant animations. The fact that an application built with Ionic runs inside of a browser does make it harder to create performant animations, but if you are aware of some common pitfalls when it comes to […]
Creating a Facebook Style Reaction Button in Ionic
Near the start of 2016, Facebook released “Reactions” which gave users a way to express themselves more deeply than just with a single “Like”. Rather than adding it a bunch of new buttons for the reactions, Facebook stayed with a single “Like” button that would then display more options when the button was held down: […]
Animating from the Void: Enter and Exit Animations in Ionic
Last week I wrote a tutorial that covered how to create a simple add to cart animation using the Angular animations library (which is based on the Web Animations API). To quickly recap, creating animations with the Angular animations library involves creating “triggers” with “states” that define a set of styles and then defining “transitions” […]
Add to Cart with the Web Animations API in Ionic
As well as looking cool, animations are best used in applications when they serve a purpose. Animations are great for conveying a range of concepts (direction, anticipation, emotions) and one particularly useful feature of animations is that they draw the attention of the user. Our eyes are naturally drawn to movement, and so animations are […]
Case Study: A Complex CouchDB/PouchDB Application in Ionic
Last week I wrote an article that gave a broad overview of the course software I built for the Elite Ionic course – a Progressive Web Application built with Ionic. This mostly detailed my approach to building it and any interesting issues I faced throughout the entire process. One point I did touch on was […]
Setting up Custom Components in Ionic
It’s not immediately obvious how to go about setting up custom components that you have added to your Ionic application. In this video, we discuss a few different methods we can use to make our components available to use, and some of the pros and cons of each approach. Here’s the video: What to watch […]
Launching a Progressive Web App (PWA) with Ionic
About a week ago I launched the early access for Elite Ionic. This is my latest course for Ionic, and it is focused on teaching advanced Ionic concepts. Typically, when I release any paid content it is in the form of an eBook, but this time I wanted to do something a little different. Elite […]
Safely Modifying Elements with ElementRef & Renderer in Ionic
There often comes a time where we will need to modify the properties of an element in our application: its background color, or its position, or something else. By using ElementRef we are able to easily get a reference to an element and its properties, and although we can modify the element’s properties directly through […]
Including Custom CSS Files in the Ionic Build Process
HTML has to take first place for markup languages, but Markdown is up there with my favourites. I use markdown for pretty much all the writing I do, and I’m also using it to format all of the lessons in Elite Ionic. It’s not much use displaying Markdown as is, though, if I want to […]
Integrating a Backend with Ionic
I often see questions like “How do I use PHP/MySQL in Ionic?” or “Does Ionic work with X backend?” – these are reasonable questions, but it indicates a big misconception as to how integrating a backend with Ionic works. The technology that is used on the backend is completely irrelevant, as the backend and the […]
Dealing with Timing Issues in Ionic E2E Tests
When creating End-to-End (E2E) tests, we are basically programming the browser to behave like a human. We tell the browser what pages to go to, what input to send, what buttons to click, and so on. In a typical E2E test, we will send multiple commands to the browser. We might tell it to click […]
Uploading a Production PWA with Ionic
In a recent tutorial, I covered how to create a Progressive Web application with Ionic using the “bare minimum” steps. PWAs are an in-depth topic, but that tutorial covers the minimum steps required to create something that would be considered a PWA. In this video tutorial, I wanted to cover the steps you need to […]
The Bare Necessities: Progressive Web Apps in Ionic
You’ve probably heard of Progressive Web Applications by now, but if you haven’t then you may want to give this a read. In short, they are all about giving applications made available through the web a more native-like experience. This means at a minimum that they should work offline, and can be installed onto a […]
What Does Lazy Loading Do in Ionic?
Lazy loading has been around for a while now, and it’s likely that you’ve had at least some experience with it if you have been building Ionic applications recently (the Ionic CLI page generator uses lazy loading by default). If you aren’t familiar with lazy loading, then you might be interested in checking out this […]
Bulk Delete UI with CSS Clip-Path in Ionic
I was browsing around Twitter the other day when I came across a tweet from Rachel Nabors (who you should definitely follow for cool web animation stuff) linking to this cool CSS clip-path maker. It allows you to switch between a bunch of different pre-defined clip-paths and apply them to an image. The general concept […]
Restricting Document Updates in CouchDB
CouchDB exposes a powerful REST API that allows you to interact with the database by making simple HTTP requests. The simplicity of CouchDB is one of its great features, but we might not always want to just blindly create or update documents. Perhaps we want to check that a user can only modify their own […]
Username Availability with an Asynchronous Validator in Angular
A little while ago I released an article named Advanced Forms & Validation in Ionic where we discussed the concept of using Validators that Angular provides for validating form fields. These validators come in two flavours: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous validators can be used to perform simple synchronous checks like whether a field is empty, […]
The Role of End-To-End (E2E) Tests in Ionic
End-To-End (E2E) testing involves creating automated tests that will test your application as a whole, rather than testing individual chunks of code in isolation (which is the purpose of a unit test). In this video tutorial, I walk through a real-world application that has some e2e tests implemented and discuss the purpose and value of […]
When to Use Providers / Services / Injectables in Ionic
A concept you will quickly come to terms with in Ionic is the concept of a page. A page is just a normal Angular component that we use to display a particular page in our application. We might have a page for displaying a list of users, and so we have a component called UserListPage […]
The Role of Unit Tests in Ionic
Unit testing is an intimidating task to get started with, and with no prior knowledge of creating automated tests, it can be hard to understand the how and why of unit testing. In this video, I walk through some unit tests I have set up for a real-world application I am working on, and we […]