This is a guest post from Simon Grimm, Ionic Insider and educator at the Ionic Academy. Simon also created the Practical Ionic book, a guide to building real world Ionic applications with Capacitor and Firebase.
You have heard that Capacitor makes it easy to access native device functionality with a simplified API — but does it really work for core native functionalities like changing the app icon on your home screen?
In this tutorial we will implement the functionality to switch your app icon on iOS using one of the Capacitor community plugins, created by John Borges, a member of our community!
Earlier this month, we announced our entire lineup of speakers at Ioniconf 2021. In addition, we also highlighted four of our speakers. Well, I’m back again to talk about four more of our amazing speakers. Let’s get to know more folks from the community who will be joining us for this year’s Ioniconf.
Alan Montgomery
Alan is someone in the Ionic community who’s been creating amazing and high-quality content for React-minded folks. To help with this, he created the Ionic React Hub where you can see his tutorials, templates, and blog posts all about building great UI. That’s why I’m thrilled Alan will be giving a design-oriented talk!
Dale Spoonemore
Dale is someone in the Ionic community whose story really resonates with me. While getting started with gardening, he wanted to learn how to code and built an app to help share what he had learned. This idea of giving back to others and helping people learn is something that I’m passionate about and I am excited for Dale to share his story.
Darryn Campbell
Darryn is a software developer who spends his time working with large enterprises, specifically in retail and shipping. With this unique perspective, Darryn can help us understand what the needs of the enterprise are and why developers pick solutions like Ionic for their apps.
Diana Rodriguez
Diana is someone who constantly leaves me excited to build with some new technology. With 20+ years of experience and a specialty in RTC/streaming technology, Diana is going to show what is possible these days with streaming on the web and mobile.
That’s all for now — be on the lookout for the next batch of speakers coming later this week and register for free for Ioniconf!
Today I’m excited to announce the availability of Stencil Enterprise, Ionic’s official toolchain for building blazing fast web components. Designed exclusively for teams building enterprise-scale Design Systems, it includes access to world-class Support and Advisory teams, priority fixes and issue resolution, and more.
Stencil Enterprise is ideal for large businesses with multiple web development teams, a portfolio of web-based applications to maintain, and a desire to standardize on a single UI library across all apps and projects.
Check out this live walkthrough of how to build successful design systems with Stencil.
Last year we held our first-ever conference for Ionic developers and the wider developer community. With twelve speakers from the developer community and an opening keynote from our own Max Lynch (Co-Founder & CEO), Ioniconf 20202 was a smashing success. That is why we are incredibly excited to hold Ioniconf again this year, bringing in more community experts to share their knowledge and experience. Without further ado, please welcome your Ioniconf 2021 speakers!
Ioniconf 2021 is a one-day, single-track conference that will be held online. We’re working with some awesome partners to provide an online platform where you can watch presentations and interact with the speakers and other attendees during the conference. Register for free to get access to the conference platform and join the conversation!
When people talk about Ionic Framework, they often put it in the “Cordova” or “Angular” buckets, because historically that’s what Ionic was: a UI kit for Cordova and Angular apps.
That was fine for the first few years of Ionic’s life, but up to around 2018 things started changing. Ionic started working on a new native runtime to replace Cordova that was fully built in house and deeply integrated into the Ionic developer experience: Capacitor. And then a year later, Ionic Framework added support for its first non-Angular framework: React (and later, Vue).
And last week, we rolled out the biggest release of Capacitor yet: Capacitor 3.0, further cementing the future of the Ionic stack as one built on the foundation laid by Capacitor.
That means, in 2021, it’s not accurate to say that Ionic Framework is just a framework for Cordova or Angular anymore, because it’s actually a framework for Capacitor that has official support for Angular, React, Vue, and unofficial support to be used in pretty much any JS stack out there.
In fact, Capacitor installs on npm recently eclipsed Cordova, and the vast, vast majority of new apps created using the Ionic CLI and online app creation wizard use Capacitor. It’s time to fix this misconception once and for all!
Here are some thoughts on how the Ionic community can change this misconception:
Today I’m thrilled to announce the 3.0 release of Capacitor, Ionic’s native runtime that makes it easy to build web apps that run on iOS, Android, Desktop, and on the web as Progressive Web Apps — all powered by a single codebase.
Capacitor connects the web to native, enabling the best of both worlds by providing the tooling and runtime that make it possible to take any modern web app and deploy it natively to all the platforms you care about.
With the release of Capacitor 3.0, we’re unlocking a new approach to building native apps with web technology — a category we’re calling Web Native apps.
In fact, Capacitor is quickly becoming the de facto standard for web developers building for mobile. It’s installed half a million times per month and growing rapidly, with thousands of new apps kicked off every week. It was also rated #1 in satisfaction among mobile development tools on the latest State of JS survey.
With the release of Capacitor 3.0, we’re planting a stake in the ground: Capacitor is now the standard for web developers building mobile apps. We’re firmly committed to making mobile development just as good as web development, and that’s exactly what Capacitor enables. Whether you have an existing web project or are curious about starting a new mobile project, we hope you’ll check out Capacitor.
Now, on to Capacitor 3.0’s major updates, which include improved performance, enhanced developer experience, and greater community involvement.
This is part three of a new series on monorepos. By the end of the series, you’ll have the tools you need to adopt monorepo setups in your organization.
Rounding out our series on monorepos, we take a look at an old friend, but a newcomer to the monorepo game, npm. Npm has long been the de-facto solution for managing dependencies, and it only makes sense that, with the release of npm 7.0, we finally have a built-in solution for creating a monorepo without relying on external tools. Compared to other solutions, however, npm workspaces lack a few features and still have some rough edges. While it is possible to build something with it, for simplicity, I’d suggest looking at Lerna as an alternative. With that being said, let’s look at how we can configure an npm workspace to work with Ionic and Vue.
Today, we are excited to announce the alpha of a new product from the Ionic team: Ionic Portals. Ionic Portals is our first product aimed at native mobile app developers and provides a supercharged Web View native control to enable native and web teams to better collaborate and bring new and existing web experiences to mobile in a safe, controlled way.
The vast majority of apps in the app stores need to integrate web assets for specific screens and experiences. It could be for authentication forms, features such as mortgage applications, or to bring web experiences to mobile without needing to port them to native. And this is the case even for teams that are fully invested in a traditional native app development stack.
But bringing these web experiences to native mobile apps and code bases is anything but straightforward. Teams struggle to integrate web apps with native functionality and do it in a safe, controlled way that doesn’t disrupt the roadmap of the traditional native development teams, and they are stuck reinventing the wheel by extending stock Web View controls such as WKWebView.
Ionic Portals is built on the industry leading Capacitor hybrid app runtime used by companies like Burger King, Paylocity, H&R Block, and Aflac to deploy mission critical apps. It’s essentially a supercharged Web View native control with a ton of features missing from the stock Web Views on iOS and Android.
Today we’re opening our alpha product waitlist looking for teams struggling with this exact problem to help us make sure we are building this the right way. Interested? Read on to see how to join the list.
This is part two of a new series on monorepos. By the end of the series, you’ll have the tools you need to adopt monorepo setups in your organization.
Between sharing code, managing dependencies across projects, and more, monorepos can require a lot of investment to get right. Thankfully, there are many different tools out there that can streamline the process and get developers on the right path. There’s Lerna, Yarn workspaces, npm workspaces (with npm v7), and the one we’ll look at today, Nx.
Let’s look at setting up an Nx workspace and looking at a few packages that can help Ionic Angular developers manage complex app setups and ship their apps faster.