Dark Hat - v1.0 has been released 🎉

After years of working in BLE technology, I found that despite there are many applications helping to test BLE devices but none of them performs their roles well. That’s why I decided to implement a BLE application on my own - Dark Hat. The core objective of this application is to share a better tool with you - an engineer working in BLE field.

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Remote Notification

Push notification allows your app to reach users more frequently, and can also perform some tasks. In this tutorial, we will learn how to config apps to get remote notifications, display contents and then perform some actions when the user presses in.
Let’s get started.

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WWDC 2020 - Top reasons why app get killed in background

Ever wonder why your app gets killed from the system when it enters the background? This post is going to summarize the top reasons introduced by Apple in WWDC 2020, and what you can do to prevent your app from being killed in the background. By applying these tips, we can improve our app’s experience because your app does not have to re-launch from the scratch.
Let’s rock!

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Best practice: iOS background processing - Background App Refresh Task

Unlike Android, iOS has restrictions for the use of background processing in an attempt of improving battery life and user experience. When your apps enter to background mode, it’s time developers get out of control of their app. How and when your app gets a chance to execute your task totally depends on the system. At the heart of iOS, Apple uses its own internally-complex algorithm to determines which apps are allowed to run in the background, based on various factors such as the pattern of user activity, current battery state, etc.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to request periodic execution time on iOS. After understanding how it works, we will apply this technique to a BLE-based app in some specific cases in the next tutorial.
Let’s rock!

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Best practice: Advanced BLE scanning process on iOS

iOS developers are building applications that play both roles Peripheral and Central to exchange data with other copies apps. The data can be exchange a small of information via BLE packets or the signal strength indicator (RSSI) value from one to the others. However, keeping the app last forever in the foreground is impossible. Sooner or later, the app will enter to background mode by the user and finally will be suspended by the system depending on RAM available, power consumption and other factors. Thus, understanding the procedure of advertising and scanning on iOS devices helps you to build good applications that fit your expectations.
At the end of this tutorial, we will build a simple application that acts as both a scanner and an advertiser. When two applications find each other, they will write a log record for analysis. Depending on the results, we will find out how effective our application is using Core Bluetooth.
Let’s switch the gear!

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iOS: Introducing Stack Views Programmatically

As your iOS development skill is growing, I believe you use UIScrollView, UICollectionView, UITableView, and other native views regularly and proficiently in your applications. Yet, some iOS developers still don’t know what exactly UIStackView is, what it uses for or in which situation should we use UIStackView.
In this tutorial, I will introduce you to UIStackView - A view helps us to simplify our iOS layouts.

Let’s imagine you’re going to build an application that allows the user to add or remove views in run time. Remember how we will accomplish this task? We first have to remove all constraints in the relative area and update them all over again. Or remember the case where you implement the sign-in / sign-up view, you add many text fields and manually set constraints between those views. In such situations, UIStackView appears to be more useful than other views.

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All About Alamofire

If you ever have a chance to work with networking on iOS, you definately have heard about Alamofire, a networking library written in Swift for iOS and MacOS. It simplifies all of the common networking jobs in your app.
If you have not meet Alamofire yet, no worries, this tutorial will introduce you all tasks that Alamofire can handle for you. If you’re familiar with it, never mind, take this post as a summarize and a centralize of your Alamofire handbook.
Let’s drive in!

Coming soon!

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Review book: Building Applications With iBeacon

In the previous post, I basically give you a quick look at iBeacon - A Bluetooth protocol built on top of BLE by Apple, and made a simple demo of how iBeacon can wake up an application after being terminated by the user. However, I did not mention other foundation concepts in Beacon, it also did not give you a deep look at the advantages and disadvantages of this powerful technology.
Today, I would like to introduce you to a good book giving a solid knowledge in Beacon field, especially iBeacon: Building Applications With iBeacon published by O’Reilly.
After reading this book, I ensure that you will get a good knowledge in iBeacon field and your mind will be more open to the next coming up ideas.
Let’s drive-in!

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