Blog

The Appery.io team is starting 2016 with new and exciting updates and improvements to the platform!

App Builder enhancements

The latest Appery.io update brings some cool features to the visual App Builder.

New Ionic components

Two new UI components for Ionic were just released: Card and Text.

The Card can be used to visually separate information on a page. It allows for more control and flexibility, and can even be animated. This new component is based on Google’s Card UI design.

The Text component can be used to conveniently place any custom text or AngularJS expression (wrapped with {{...}}) on the page.

The Ionic Button has obtained new property – Icon Only. It makes a button look like an icon. This property converts a button to an icon by changing Icon Style and Style properties, and ignoring the Text property.

It’s now possible to copy and clone components in the App Builder. To create a full copy of a UI component with all nested children, (including other components), click the clone icon on the top right of the component:

Cloning a component

Ionic page templates

When creating a new page in Ionic, you can choose a blank page or a page with ionContent. The blank page is a simple page without any extra components. Use it when you don’t need to make any special adjustments to the scroll or scrollbar settings. The page with ionContent is a multi-tool page with a ion-content directive and many settings provided by Ionic. Use it when you need to make flexible adjustments to page scroll behavior.

You can find more detailed templates description in our docs.

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When building AngularJS apps (with Ionic or Bootstrap frameworks) using Appery.io, you can easily extend app functionality by adding native device features. Features such as push, geolocation, camera, etc., can be added by importing the appropriate plug-ins. To do this, go to CREATE NEW > From plug-in and select the appropriate plug-in. The native features come from the Cordova library, which is automatically installed in every app.

For each plug-in we have documentation as well as detailed tutorials on native device features. You can find the docs here.

Make sure to check out all of our mobile development tips.

Do you want to build apps fast? Start developing with our trial plan!

Appery.io is the best mobile app development platform out there. Get the most out of it with our webinars. We’ve put together six so far to kick off the new year. The first two cover the most used frameworks on the platform. The next webinar delves into our service for making enterprise assets like SQL databases into REST services. Our last three webinars cover different backend services we offer on the platform that you can use in your apps. Register now and get ready for mobile enlightenment.
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One way to customize your app is to use a custom push notification icon. By the default, the push notification icon is your app icon.

Setting a custom icon for incoming push notifications is available only for Android OS and only for version 3 libraries (jQuery Mobile).

To set a custom push notification image:

1. Upload your custom image (for example: icon.png) into the ANDROID/project_name/res/drawable/ folder to set it as a push image. If there is no drawable folder, simply create it:
   
2. On the Source tab, open the WEB_RESOURCES > app > startScreen.js file.
3. Find the PushNotification.init function and add an icon property with 'icon' value:
   
4. Now your app has a custom push notification icon!

Read more about Appery.io push notifications in our documentation and make sure to check out all of our mobile development tips.

Do you want to build apps fast? Start developing with our trial plan!

In this post, we’ll show you how to open a URL received in a push notification message for both jQuery Mobile and AngularJS apps.

This tutorial assumes you are familiar with how to send and retrieve push notifications. If you are not, this tutorial will show how to send your first push notification message.

Let’s start with a jQuery Mobile app.

To open a URL when a push notification message is received, use the Load page event and add the following JavaScript code:

$(document).on("push-notification", function(event, data) {
   window.open(data.message, "_blank");
});

This is how the event looks in the App Builder:

Code to read Push Notification message and navigate to a URL

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In the “Appery.io under the Hood” series, we’ll be explaining in detail how Appery.io works. We hope that this information will give you a deeper insight into how to make better apps by giving you a deeper understanding of the platform.

Loading resources when needed

When developing big scalable web apps, the question of how to manage tons of libraries and services arises pretty quickly. There are a few key reason why a powerful and flexible dependency management tool becomes mandatory:

• The vast majority of libraries dictate their own requirements for dependencies. This makes it critically important to load and launch resources in the appropriate order
• Loading all the libraries and other resources at once increases network traffic and should be avoided when possible. This is even more important for mobile apps
• App loading time can be significantly decreased when loading only the required libraries:
  • A ready event will be fired only once for all the required resources
  • For mobile devices and apps, page size can be optimized as much as possible to prevent browser or OS failures
  • Overloading the device CPU by loading unnecessary libraries will decrease battery life
• The bigger the development team, the more complicated library dependency management becomes

This is why Appery.io has chosen RequireJS to solve the cumbersome process of dependency management. Let’s see how RequireJS is used in Appery.io apps.

RequireJS

RequireJS implements an AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) approach and allows the declarative description of dependencies among app modules. RequireJS also guarantees that all module dependencies will be resolved before module execution. In the AMD pattern means each module has its own isolated variables area. This makes your app more stable by reducing the possibility of namespace conflicts. 

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We are often asked about displaying a PDF file in a mobile app. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to display a PDF file uploaded to the Appery.io cloud database in your mobile app.

First, upload the PDF file into the Files collection of your database. You can use any existing database or quickly create a new database.

Appery.io Database Files collection

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Configuring your app routing is really easy with the Appery.io Routing tab. You can find it under Project > Routing. When creating a new page, a route for it will be created automatically. You can then change its name or select needed dependencies, which is really convenient.

Then, in your code, you can get to that page using Route name this way:

Apperyio.navigateTo("Screen2");

Routes with dynamic parameters are available as well. You can find out more about it (and, generally, about the Appery.io routing feature) in our documentation.

Make sure to check out all of our mobile development tips.

Do you want to build apps fast? Start developing with our trial plan!

Every Appery.io app comes with the Apache Cordova library automatically installed. This means you have access to default Cordova APIs such as Camera, Contacts, Geolocation, and more. Many users also wanted to add 3rd-party Cordova plugins to the app. To make this process very simple, we’ve added a simple wizard. In this tutorial you are going to learn how to upload a Cordova plugin to your app and use it. You will build an app that will track your route and draw it on a map. The app will do this in the background. (This is a popular feature in fitness apps.)

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PayPal API is one of the most popular Appery.io plug-ins, and now it’s also available for Ionic & AngularJS!

Our users have frequently requested the ability to add payments to their Ionic & AngularJS mobile apps more quickly, for example, to create an online shop. Now, with the help of this plug-in, you could build an online shop (for instance) to be used by your Ionic & AngularJS app really easily.

A few notes about the security implemented in this app:

• Authentication with PayPal occurs via a Server Code script. It takes your PayPal app credentials and sends XHR to PayPal. The token is stored to the database.
• By using the Secure Proxy feature, the actual token value will be substituted on the server side. This way any PayPal API can be triggered.
• Because of the server-based authentication, sensitive data such as the client secret or token value will never be shown in the app, which eliminates the possibility of theft.

Finally, a few, more general, notes:

• The flow implemented in this plug-in is similar to PayPal’s flow.
• We have a PayPal API plug-in tutorial here. Check it out to configure the plug-in.
• The plug-in is configured for a test environment, so use the PayPal guide too see what you need to do when going live.