The essential news about content management systems and mobile technology. Powered by Perfect Publisher and XT Search for Algolia.
The News Site publishes posts to the following channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Web Push, Tumblr, and Blogger.
A new year brings support for new mobile app frameworks in Appflow, the mobile DevOps solution from Ionic. Now, developers can build traditional native iOS and Android apps in Appflow, expanding on existing support for Capacitor, Cordova, and React Native.
This release continues Appflow’s mission to make mobile DevOps easy for all developers, regardless of framework or DevOps experience.
Appflow started as the solution for cross-platform developers using Capacitor and Cordova to easily build native mobile apps in the cloud, ship to app stores, and automate workflows.
With last year’s release of React Native support and now traditional native iOS and Android, more teams than ever can leverage Appflow to build mobile CI/CD pipelines. Developers can orchestrate entire workflows within Appflow’s dashboard, or use Appflow’s CLI to integrate builds, deployments, and live updates into existing CI/CD workflows.
Support for additional mobile development frameworks is particularly impactful for enterprise organizations. In an October webinar, the Appflow team highlighted specific complexities of developing mobile apps at the enterprise level. For these larger organizations coordinating deployments across teams using multiple frameworks, a tool like Appflow provides a single platform for all teams, removing knowledge silos and the need to manage multiple tools.
Traditional native support includes Android (typically Kotlin or Java) and iOS (typically Swift or Objective-C) mobile apps. Unlike hybrid or cross-platform apps built with Capacitor or React Native, these apps are designed specifically for a single native platform.
To start building and shipping a traditional native iOS or Android app, use the same easy implementation process Appflow provides for other mobile architectures.
Import your app by connecting to the project repository on your Git provider and selecting iOS (Beta) or Android (Beta) during app setup.
Once your app is connected, configure signing certificates, deployment destinations, and any custom environments as needed. Select a commit to start the build, selecting the build stack, type, and optional configurations.
Configure variables or secret keys in the Appflow dashboard, or leverage support for iOS Schemes and Android Variants. Set up automated workflows based on a branch trigger, or use the Ionic Cloud CLI to integrate with an existing CI/CD pipeline.
The Appflow experience is nearly identical regardless of the mobile architecture. However, Web Previews and Live Updates are currently only available for Capacitor or Cordova apps. Our documentation outlines which features are available using mobile architecture badges. The Appflow team will continue to expand supported mobile architectures and new features.
Existing Appflow customers can get started today by importing a traditional native iOS or Android app. Appflow plan administrators can invite new team members as needed using the instructions here.
To try out builds, deployments, and automations for your mobile applications, start a free trial of Appflow here.
The post Appflow adds support for traditional native iOS and Android apps appeared first on Ionic Blog.
Read more https://ionic.io/blog/appflow-traditional-native-ios-android
Expediting native mobile application development within time and budget constraints is difficult. With the persistent need to improve customer experience and increase developer efficiency, many enterprises have turned to the speed and ease of web development to keep up with demand—a resource that many of them already have. But maintaining native mobile and web code bases and achieving parity between the two can add complexity to an already complicated organizational structure.
iOS and Android Web Views to the rescue. Or so you might think.
Web Views brings two teams together—web and native—to build mobile applications faster and more efficiently. They allow for web content to be embedded into native applications, typically by breaking up the native application’s front end into feature slices, or micro frontends. By embedding web content, developers can focus on building fantastic user experiences while leaving the content development to the web team. This also ensures web and native parity; as web features are updated, the web content embedded in the native app is also updated from the same code base.
Development kits from Apple and Google provide stock Web Views for native app developers to start using right away. These out-of-the-box experiences seem like the ideal solution for bringing web and native content together to build and scale mobile apps, but there are many factors to consider when using stock Web Views in your app infrastructure.
From usability issues to feature limitations, here are the things you should be considering.
Large, global enterprises like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix have been using Web Views for years. By embedding web content into their native apps, Apple can update their music catalog without relying on native teams to build the content into the native app. Similarly, Amazon uses Web Views to update their millions of product offerings, and Netflix updates their movie and TV show database with ease using Web Views. Though stock Web Views enable these companies to dynamically update their apps, the setup and maintenance to make this happen smoothly requires a number of talented developers and time.
The basic functionality of a stock Web View is to break up the native app into micro frontends. But what if a native development team wants to communicate between the web and native layers? That has to be manually built. If developers want to maintain native component interactivity with the web content, they need to build that too.
“With iOS and Android Web Views, handling delegate methods for navigation, load, errors, permission requests, and other general housekeeping all need to be built manually,” says Max Lynch, CEO and co-founder of Ionic.
In other words, customizations need to be built to provide a seamless experience that makes the native application and web content truly feel native.
Imagine an engineering manager decides to dedicate the time to make custom-built Web Views. Their team establishes the communication between the web and native layers, builds a system to ensure native component functionality with the web content, and develops custom native navigation controls. This effort could take weeks to build and test, and this lift only accounts for one code base. This whole process needs to be repeated for every mobile application on every platform.
“Developers have to learn two different APIs, iOS WKWebView and Android WebView,” says Vivek Mano, director, product specialist at Ionic. “On top of that, development teams have to account for various mobile OS versions.”
Pulling web content into a native application through stock Web Views loads the content from a remote server rather than locally. This means a poor user experience if the user’s internet connection is slow, intermittent, or loses connectivity altogether.
In addition, there is always an inherent lag whenever content is pulled from a server, even with the best internet connection. A major airline recently discovered that using custom Web Views slowed app performance by 2-3 seconds because the web content took a long time to load.
While stock Web Views can save development time and effort and ensure parity across web and native applications, they can just as easily counteract that progress.
Stock Web Views, for all of their promise to improve the app development experience, lack in many areas. That’s why we built Portals.
Ionic Portals saves development teams countless hours required to custom build Web Views to fit their app needs. Portals handles all of the configuration and maintenance without the hassle by offering:
In addition to the built-in features provided out-of-the-box, Portals’ Web Views are on-device, meaning the content is downloaded to the device rather than accessed from a remote server. This improves loading speed significantly and doesn’t rely on server access to pull in data. The same major airline mentioned earlier reported a 2-3 second app speed improvement with Portals.
If you’re considering moving your native applications to an architecture that supports iOS and Android Web Views, Portals may be for you. Reach out to an App Specialist to discuss your company’s needs and activate a trial.
The post Limitations with iOS and Android Web Views appeared first on Ionic Blog.
Read more https://ionic.io/blog/limitations-with-ios-and-android-web-views
It’s a Christmas miracle—Bootstrap v5.3.0-alpha1 has arrived just in time for the holiday break! This release brings new color mode support, an expanded color palette with variables and utilities, and more.
We’re keeping things short and simple in this blog post with deeper dives into the new color modes and more coming in future posts. For now, we want you to enjoy the holiday break and come back next year feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. Keep reading for what’s new and we’ll see you next year!
Bootstrap now supports an explicit opt-in for creating multiple
color modes via the data-bs-theme
attribute on the
root <html>
element. We opted for a
data
attribute solution so that you can create any
number of themes instead of just light and dark. We use a new Sass
mixin, color-mode()
, to generate our dark
mode styles with either a data attribute (the default) or a media
query. The latter is useful if you only have two color modes and
want automatic color mode changing via CSS.
Read more in the new color mode docs.
For those wanting to build something more advanced, you can read how we built our own color mode picker with JavaScript that respects the device or operating system setting by default, but still allows someone to override it with an explicit theme.
If you’re using the CDN or starter template, using the new color
modes is straightforward. Add the data-bs-theme
attribute with light
or dark
values to
the <html>
element and you’ll be using either
the light or dark theme.
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en" data-bs-theme="dark">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Bootstrap demo</title>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.3.0-alpha1/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-GLhlTQ8iRABdZLl6O3oVMWSktQOp6b7In1Zl3/Jr59b6EGGoI1aFkw7cmDA6j6gD" crossorigin="anonymous">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, world!</h1>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.3.0-alpha1/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-w76AqPfDkMBDXo30jS1Sgez6pr3x5MlQ1ZAGC+nuZB+EYdgRZgiwxhTBTkF7CXvN" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
</body>
</html>
Want to use CSS media queries to change the color mode instead? You can also build Bootstrap with Sass and customize how you use color modes. Read the docs to learn more. You can even create custom color modes.
We have a huge new color palette update with new Sass variables, CSS variables, and utilities to boot. Foreground and background colors have new secondary, tertiary, and emphasis colors to choose from, while our theme colors have expanded on to include their subtle background colors, subtle border colors, and darker text colors. We’ve rebuilt some components (like list groups and alerts) to use these new variables in their source Sass and compiled CSS so that they respond to the color mode changes.
Check out the new colors docs.
And a few more noteworthy changes:
Added new CSS variables for grid breakpoints, link colors, close
button, alert links, forms, and more. In addition, many components
have been updated to use more global CSS variables like
--bs-border-color
to better respond to changing color
modes.
Floating forms have been updated to be more bulletproof and now include proper support for textareas.
Added many new utilities, including fw-medium
,
overflow
and object-fit
utilities,
z-index, and more. Plus, border-radius
utilities have been updated so that you can combine
.rounded-{top|bottom|start|end}
with
.rounded-{0-5|pill|circle}
.
Fixed some Popper tooltip and popover consistency issues.
Be sure to consult the v5.3.0 migration guide to see what’s changed as well.
As we iron out the release with your feedback and bug reports, we’ll also be updating the Bootstrap Blog and Bootstrap Icons sites to use the new themes soon. We’ll also continue to refine how our components and utilities work with the new color modes, adding Sass testing to improve our coverage of how folks build with Bootstrap, and much more.
Head to https://getbootstrap.com for the latest. It’s also been pushed to npm:
npm i bootstrap@v5.3.0-alpha1
Read the GitHub v5.3.0-alpha1 changelog for a complete list of changes in this release.
Visit our Open Collective page or our team members’ GitHub profiles to help support the maintainers contributing to Bootstrap.
Read more https://blog.getbootstrap.com/2022/12/24/bootstrap-5-3-0-alpha1/
Read more https://www.extly.com/blog/22-latest-news/792-happy-holidays-and-best-wishes-for-2023.html
The Ionic team is looking forward to the New Year and welcoming in 2023! To get the party started, we’re giving our Ionic account login and signup experience a totally new look.
Starting today, the login and signup pages will be customized based on which products you’re accessing—whether it’s building apps with Ionic, creating micro frontends with Portals, or automating app delivery with Appflow. Also, the location of both the login and signup pages will be moving from ionicframework.com to ionic.io.
To make sure you can still access all of your favorite Ionic products, here’s everything you need to know:
We hope you all enjoy the new page. If you have any feedback,
comments, or suggestions, please reach out to us on Discord or via
email at
The post A Fresh New Way To Access Your Ionic Account appeared first on Ionic Blog.
Read more https://ionic.io/blog/a-fresh-new-way-to-access-your-ionic-account