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Category: Developer News

We are thrilled to announce the integration of Bluesky with Perfect Publisher. This integration combines Bluesky's privacy-centric features with Perfect Publisher's powerful automation capabilities, offering a seamless and efficient solution for engaging your audience on this innovative platform.

Read more https://www.extly.com/blog/22-latest-news/801-introducing-bluesky-integration-with-perfect-publisher.html

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Category: Developer News

One of the biggest hurdles for any successful app development project is time. Deadlines remain tight and there never seems to be enough engineers to get the work done. But in today’s fast-paced business landscape, it’s critical to remain agile, adjusting the product roadmap rapidly to meet market demands and stay ahead of the competition. 

So how can your development teams build and deliver secure, high-performing apps across platforms? And do so with pace? Enter Ionic’s Enterprise SDK, a game-changer for accelerating enterprise app development and time-to-market.

Speed meets security

Nothing delays product launches quite like building the same thing twice. Juggling multiple codebases and reinventing the same wheels project after project only compounds the issue. That’s why the Enterprise SDK provides a single, cross-platform solution for building robust apps for iOS, Android, and the web. By removing the need to write separate code for each platform, development time is quite literally cut in half.

Marvin M., an Enterprise Architect in the healthcare industry, sums it up nicely when he says, “We find building enterprise and industry-focused apps with Ionic to be cheaper and faster than having to hire and maintain three separate development teams.”

However, speed shouldn’t mean compromised security. After all, enterprise apps require top-notch protection. So, Enterprise SDK comes equipped with a comprehensive security suite, including:

• Auth Connect: Streamline user authentication with mobile single sign-on (SSO) and the latest native security protocols.
• Identity Vault: Lock down sensitive data with advanced biometric protections.
• Secure Storage: Keep data safe offline with a secure, cross-platform local database system.

These pre-built solutions are supported and managed by Ionic to remain up to date with the latest industry security best practices. They save developers time and ensure robust data protection by eliminating the need to build complex security features from scratch. Instead, developers can rest easy knowing that their data is secure, so they can focus on building their app’s key features.

Accelerated development

The Enterprise SDK doesn’t stop at security, it comes out-of-the-box with a mobile UI toolkit ensuring teams aren’t bogged down with the nuances of design systems. Instead they get a library of adaptive, mobile-ready components that look and feel at home on any user’s device.

The SDK also tackles another engineering heavy hitter – native integrations. Plug-and-play solutions are available to tap into native device features, such as camera, filesystem, preferences and storage, when they’re needed. This removes the need to build complex code around interfacing with the device-level APIs.

However, you can’t just build the app. You need to get it in the hands of users. So, the SDK’s mobile DevOps arm simplifies the process of delivering the app to the respective app stores for download. By offering services to build and sign the native binaries required by Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, teams can leverage their existing version control system to keep up-to-date builds flowing to the appropriate development and production environments.

Solutions at each phase of the mobile development lifecycle are what businesses like Kristofer P.’s point to as the “… technology [they] rely on!”

The reliability doesn’t end with the software. It continues with the support and advisory services included within the Enterprise SDK. Experts are available to assist your development teams when they need it. Stuck on a bug? Need help keeping pace with framework and package changes? Industry leading support specialists can work with your team to ensure they meet their critical development goals and remain proactive in app and data security.

Jedidiah W., CEO of the leading mobile app development consultancy OpenForge, has seen the value of Ionic’s enterprise support service first-hand. He says, “we work with a ton of enterprise customers and every single one loves Ionic’s support structure.”

Outpace the competition

With Ionic’s Enterprise SDK at your disposal, expect your development time to reduce by weeks, if not months. With its focus on speed, security, and developer productivity, it empowers enterprise teams to build and deliver exceptional apps that drive business growth.

Eager to learn more? Schedule a demo with industry experts to see how your team can benefit from all the SDK has to offer. If you’re ready to dive right in, activate your free trial to experience the power firsthand.

The post Ship Enterprise Apps Faster with Ionic’s Enterprise SDK appeared first on Ionic Blog.

Read more https://ionic.io/blog/ship-enterprise-apps-faster-with-ionic-enterprise-sdk

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Category: Developer News

Today we are thrilled to announce the release of the Ionic 8 beta! This release is the culmination of many months of hard work by the development team and brings improvements to theming, accessibility, and more!

Let’s dive in

Simplified APIs for Importing Themes

Ionic 8 now ships both the light and dark themes built into the project. For added convenience, the light theme is automatically imported via the core.css file. Importing the dark theme is as simple as importing a single CSS file:

import '@ionic/react/css/themes/dark.system.css';

In Ionic 7 and earlier, developers added light and dark themes by manually copying and pasting design tokens into their applications. However, as Ionic evolved, we discovered that this solution was hard for developers to maintain as well as hard for us to scale.

The above stylesheet will apply the dark theme based on the system settings for a user’s preferred color scheme. With this approach, developers will always receive the latest and greatest light and dark themes whenever they update Ionic. Additionally, developers can continue to customize our themes!

But wait, there’s more! Developers still have full control over how the dark theme is applied. For example, developers can configure their application to always apply the dark theme or only apply the dark theme when a CSS class is present on the body element. This can be done by importing either the dark.always.css or dark.class.css files.

As part of this, we’ve revamped the Dark Mode documentation to give you more information about how to apply the dark theme stylesheet effectively.

Revised Color Palette

Also in Ionic 8 is a revised color palette that focuses on improving color contrast. Each color token (primary, secondary, success, etc) now meets AA contrast levels as defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines when used with a proper contrast color. This increases readability in your Ionic application as users can more easily distinguish the foreground from the background.

In Ionic 7 and earlier we realized that certain colors had low color contrast even when used against the recommended contrast colors. We want to make it easy to build accessible experiences with Ionic, and having accessible colors is an important part of that.

Thanks to the new API for importing themes, it’s easy for developers to take advantage of these revised color tokens upon updating to Ionic 8! Developers can continue to customize the color tokens, too.

To showcase these new colors, we’ve updated the Color Generator.

High Contrast Theme

The revised color palette is great for ensuring AA level compliance for color contrast, but what about scenarios where we need even higher levels of color contrast? In Ionic 8, we are pleased to introduce the new high contrast light and dark themes! With these themes, each color token now meets AAA contrast levels for text when used with a proper contrast color. Additionally, other details such as item borders and sub text also have increased color contrast.

Thanks to the new API for importing themes, developers can easily opt-in to these high-contrast themes by importing the light and dark CSS files:

import '@ionic/react/css/themes/high-contrast.system.css';
import '@ionic/react/css/themes/high-contrast-dark.system.css';

iOS and Android have system-level settings allowing users to enable or disable the high-contrast theme. As with the previous theme improvements noted in this blog, we’ve also provided high-contrast.always.css and high-contrast.class.css files to give you full control over when these themes are applied.

Check out the new High Contrast Documentation for more information.

New Step Color Tokens

To better support the previously mentioned high contrast theme, we are introducing a new set of step color tokens. These step colors allow developers to control text colors independently of background colors.

:root {
  --ion-text-color-step-50: #f2f2f2; /* only used for text */
  --ion-background-color-step-50: #0d0d0d; /* only used for background */
}

 In previous versions of Ionic, we had tokens that followed the syntax --ion-color-step-[number]. These step colors provided a grayscale palette for customizing background and text at the same time. This architecture proved challenging for the high contrast theme as simply darkening the step color values would actually reduce color contrast.

For example, for ion-datetime-button, making the step colors darker would cause the black text in the button to be displayed against a dark gray background, which defeats the purpose of the high contrast theme.

Ionic 8 is backward compatible with the older --ion-color-step-[number] tokens, so developers do not need to migrate immediately. However, we recommend adopting them as soon as possible as they are required to use the high contrast theme.See the Stepped Color Documentation for more information.

Revised Styles for iOS 17

We’ve also made several small changes to our iOS components to better align with the iOS 17 design system. Most of these changes are fairly subtle, but one notable feature is the ability to disable action sheet buttons. Previously, all buttons in an action sheet were always enabled. We’ve also added this behavior to the Material Design variant of action sheet so users can have a consistent experience across platforms.

Check out the Action Sheet documentation for more.

New Picker Experience

Last but certainly not least in the line of new features is the new Picker experience in Ionic. With the introduction of the new Datetime in Ionic v6, you may have noticed that the component sported a new inline Picker. We’ve been piloting this new experience as part of an internal component only available inside Datetime. With Ionic 8, we are excited to finally roll this experience out to all developers!

This new experience has several notable advantages over the Picker found in previous versions of Ionic:

1. Improved performance: Thanks to CSS Scroll Snapping, the new Picker experience comes with the same smooth scrolling behavior found in traditional native applications. This means the swipe interactions will run up to 120fps on supported devices! Additionally, developers can expect to see improved scrolling performance even on less powerful devices.
   
2. Presentation flexibility: Previous versions of the Picker always displayed the component as an overlay that sat on top of your page content. The new Picker experience gives the flexibility to render the Picker either as an overlay or directly in line with your page content. Additionally, the new Picker can be rendered in either a Modal or a Popover instead of always being fixed at the bottom of the screen.

3. Compatibility with JavaScript framework template features: Previous iterations of the Picker required that developers pass an array full of several options to the Picker in order to render columns with options. This was not a great experience because it meant that developers needed to pass that same large payload any time they wanted to alter a single option or column. For example, if developers wanted to remove or add an option, they would need to set each option in each column for the Ppicker again.
   Since columns and options can be written directly using the new ion-picker-column and ion-picker-column-option components, developers can take full advantage of the templating capabilities provided by each JavaScript framework.

For example, this feature allows Angular developers to iterate through column options using an @for. Any time the associated data array changes, Angular will re-render and automatically add or remove the appropriate column option components. This new approach is great for displaying reactive data.

<ion-picker>
  <ion-picker-column value="red">
    @for (option of options) {
      <ion-picker-column-option [value]="option.value">
        {{ option.text }}
      </ion-picker-column-option>
    }
  </ion-picker-column>
</ion-picker>

Not ready to take advantage of the new Picker experience? Fear not! The Picker experience found in Ionic 7 is still available with the ion-picker-legacy component.

Check out the Picker documentation for more examples of all the great things you can do with this component.

Legacy Form Control Syntax Removal

In Ionic 7, we introduced a new form control syntax that brought the following improvements:

1. Reduces code boilerplate by removing the ion-item and ion-label requirements.
2. Improves compatibility with assistive technologies by ensuring the form control is associated with a label.
3. Enhances the developer experience by clarifying the intent of form component APIs.

This new syntax improves the accessibility of Ionic apps while reducing technical debt with Ionic Framework, making it easier than before to fix bugs and add new features.

During the Ionic 7 development cycle, developers could continue using the legacy form control syntax if they did not want to upgrade immediately. We heard a lot of feedback from developers regarding bugs and missing features. We’ve been listening to your feedback, and the team worked hard throughout 2023 to resolve the highest priority bugs and add missing features from our implementation.

Now that the highest priority bugs have been resolved and the features that developers needed to migrate to the new form control syntax have been added, it’s time to retire the legacy form control syntax.
As of Ionic 8, the legacy property on form controls, as well as support for the legacy form control syntax has been removed.

Commitment to an Easy Upgrade Process

While breaking changes are one tool that allows us to continue to improve Ionic, we realize they are disruptive to your work. As a result, Ionic 8 has fewer breaking changes than Ionic 5, Ionic 6, and Ionic 7! Additionally, many of the larger breaking changes have had migration paths available for over a year, allowing developers to migrate early and avoid some of the Ionic 8 breaking changes.

Try the Ionic 8 Beta

Developers can start with the Ionic 8 beta by visiting the Ionic 8 migration guide. Developers should also consult the Ionic 8 breaking changes guide.

As always, any bug reports can be filed on the Ionic Framework repo.

Starter applications will continue to use Ionic 7 and will only be updated to ship with Ionic 8 once Ionic 8 is formally released.

Thank You

Ionic 8 is another huge step forward for Ionic applications with great enhancements to theming, accessibility, revised iOS designs, and the new Picker experience. We’d like to thank the community for their continued support of this project. Ionic 8 would not have been possible without your efforts!

The post Announcing the Ionic 8 Beta appeared first on Ionic Blog.

Read more https://ionic.io/blog/announcing-the-ionic-8-beta

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Category: Developer News

In the latest release of iOS 17.4, Apple seems to have chosen to significantly limit home screen web apps (or PWAs if you’d like). In this release, if you choose to use a third-party browser (any other browser that doesn’t use WebKit under the hood) and try to save a web app to the home screen, iOS will now open that web app in your browser, instead of a home screen app shell. 

Why the change?

Apple claims that this update was made to comply with EU’s orders for allowing alternative browsers on iOS. To comply with this order, they have done significant work to allow for an alternative browser choice, but in doing so, they’ve essentially removed the ability for a headless app shell for any home screen web app. Their claim is that because users could be using an alternative browser, there’s no way to guarantee security and privacy when saving a web app. This has led them to essentially remove the experience altogether for users in the EU.

What This Means for Ionic Apps

We at Ionic want to reassure our community of developers that we have their back. We’re following upcoming iOS releases in hopes that this move from Apple will be reversed at some point. For developers in the EU that are worried about their projects, fear not. 

Ionic’s bet on web technologies allows us to not worry about any potential hurdles that Apple may try to enforce. With our native runtime Capacitor, the same web app that you were hoping to ship as a PWA can ship as a native iOS app with no changes needed from you. By simply adding Capacitor to your project, you now have full access to any native capabilities while still being able to utilize your web development skills. 

Future-proofing Your App

While PWAs have mostly been used in the indie developer community, many large enterprises we talk with have been hoping to take advantage of a PWA in order to get their app to market quicker. If you’re an enterprise development team that still wants to work within the realms of PWAs and ship a native app for iOS (or Android), Ionic can help you make sure your apps are ready when Apple stops limiting their browser and mobile devices.  

The post A note on iOS 17.4 and PWAs appeared first on Ionic Blog.

Read more https://ionic.io/blog/a-note-on-ios-17-4-and-pwas