October 2014
Intermediate to advanced
80 pages
1h 33m
English
Content preview from Building Applications with iBeacon
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Chapter 4. Application Development
iBeacons and the applications they empower are tied at the hip. One of the benefits of using such a simple protocol is that it is limited only by the imagination of the developer community.13 This chapter describes the basic elements of application development with iBeacon—in essence, the seeds from which all iBeacon-enabled applications grow.
iBeacons have one operation: to transmit advertisement packets. Mobile devices either receive the beacon transmission or do not. Everything in the iBeacon ecosystem flows from that simple statement. Proximity is defined as “I am close enough to the beacon to receive its transmissions.”
As discussed in Chapter 2, iBeacons repeatedly transmit three numbers, and that’s it. Those numbers are used to trigger actions on the device, but otherwise, a beacon transmission is not all that interesting. If an application developer wants to interact with the user by popping up a message, contacting a server, or pushing data to the user, that must be done by programming an application to take those actions.
A beacon’s advertisement includes no descriptive text or mapping. Translation between the beacon’s transmissions and any actions are done entirely within an application on the receiver, even if the application is a simple text message to say, “Welcome to the region.” iBeacons are not servers, and they do not need to have storage for anything beyond the contents of the numbers in the advertisement packet.14
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