Often, our production environments are quite different to our development environments. Whilst your application is in development you might just want to make requests to a database running locally on your machine. When you are deploying the application to production you would want the requests to be made to the production database that lives on […]
Shadow DOM Usage in Ionic Web Components
Beginning with Ionic 4, all of Ionic’s components will be web components. Unlike previous iterations of the framework where the components were built using Angular, the move to web components means Ionic can now be used just about anywhere. One aspect of web components is the ability to define custom HTML elements, which basically means […]
Creating a Custom Scroll Vanish Directive with Ionic Web Components
As I was scrolling through Twitter’s PWA (I assume this would be the same in their native application as well), I noticed that when you scroll down on a screen that has a “double toolbar” in the header: The top “toolbar” will animate off of the screen, leaving only the tab bar: This leaves more […]
Augmented Reality in an Ionic/Angular PWA
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Publishing a Web Component Using Stencil (And Using It Anywhere)
Over the past couple of weeks we have explored creating custom components within Ionic/Angular, and creating custom web components using Stencil. Although both behave very similarly, the key difference between creating an Angular component, and a Stencil component, is that Stencil generates generic web components that can be used anywhere. Angular components can only be […]
Creating a Google Maps Web Component with Stencil
Last week, we created a custom Google Maps component for an Ionic/Angular application. Since I have also been creating a lot of Stencil content recently, I think it is fun to see how we could build the same components that we build for Ionic/Angular, except as a generic web component with Stencil. To that end, […]
Using Google Maps and Geolocation in Ionic with Capacitor
Google Maps integration is consistently one of the most popular features of mobile applications. I’ve published tutorials on how to use Google Maps with Ionic many times in the past, but I wanted to revisit the basics again now that some time has passed. Previously, I have used Ionic and Cordova to build a Google […]
Automatic Scroll to Bottom Chat Interface with Mutation Observers in Ionic
It is common in chat interfaces to have the latest messages displayed at the bottom of the screen, and for the screen to automatically scroll to the latest message when a new one is added. This is a feature I added to the chat application that is built in the last module of Elite Ionic, […]
Accessing and Adding Styles to the Host Element in Stencil
In the previous tutorial, we rebuilt a component that was originally designed with Angular. However, instead of using Angular to build it we used Stencil instead to create a generic web component that could work anywhere. Since we were no longer using a framework like Angular, we had to make a couple of changes to […]
Using Stencil to Create a Custom Web Component with a Public API Method
Last week, we built a flash message component with Angular. The purpose of this component was to allow for a way to easily make a one-line call from anywhere in the application to display a flash message like this: I think it is interesting to then consider what this same component might look like, and […]
Improving the UI/UX of an Ionic Component
In this tutorial, we are going to improve upon the flash message service that we created in the last tutorial. I offered some suggestions for improving the service at the end of that tutorial which included: Allowing for different messages styles (success, danger, warning, etc.) Displaying a bar to indicate how long the message will […]
Creating a Flash Message Service in Ionic
You will often run into circumstances in your application where you want to send some kind of alert to the user. You might want to let them know that they have lost their Internet connection, or that a post failed to upload, or that a photo has finished successfully uploading. In terms of the built-in […]
Replicating a Cloudant Database to CouchDB
Last week, I wrote a tutorial that walked through how to set up a CouchDB database on a self-hosted Ubuntu server. I talked about some of the benefits of going for a self-hosted approach over using a service like Cloudant. One of the big benefits of the CouchDB protocol is how portable it is. With […]
Adding CAPTCHA to Ionic with NodeJS Middleware
When I built the Elite Ionic course, I built it as a PWA using Ionic. Anybody who signs up for the course can log in to the application and browse through the various modules. When people create accounts, they need passwords, and when passwords are involved they will inevitably be forgotten at some point. For […]
Creating a CouchDB Database on an Ubuntu Server (Digital Ocean)
One of the cool things about CouchDB is how portable it is. It can run just about anywhere and interact with other CouchDB style databases anywhere. Any database that speaks the CouchDB Replication Protocol will be able to interact with any other database that does the same. This is why we can use libraries like […]
Adding ES6/TypeScript Support to a NodeJS Server
In past tutorials, we have covered setting up a basic Node/Express server and even integrating a Node server with Ionic. Up until this point, we have just been using the standard ES5 JavaScript syntax when building the server. If you are used to using Ionic, and many readers of this blog would be, then you […]