Wrap up
Working with iBeacon locations is different from working with maps. The technology is often called micro-location because it can tell the difference between a few centimeters and a meter or more. Plus it works inside, which is somewhere GPS continues to be poor, and understandably.
What I like about iBeacons is their subtlety: hardware beacons are almost invisibly small, yet provide the ability for apps to respond to a user’s precise location – you can now make apps for museums, galleries, stores, schools, warehouses, and more, and it took less than 30 minutes.
Review what you learned
Anyone can sit through a tutorial, but it takes actual work to remember what was taught. It’s my job to make sure you take as much from these tutorials as possible, so I’ve prepared a short review to help you check your learning.
Click here to review what you learned in project 22.
Challenge
One of the best ways to learn is to write your own code as often as possible, so here are three ways you should try your new knowledge to make sure you fully understand what’s going on:
- Write code that shows a
UIAlertControllerwhen your beacon is first detected. Make sure you set a Boolean to say the alert has been shown, so it doesn’t keep appearing. - Go through two or three other iBeacons in the Detect Beacon app and add their UUIDs to your app, then register all of them with iOS. Now add a second label to the app that shows new text depending on which beacon was located.
- Add a circle to your view, then use animation to scale it up and down depending on the distance from the beacon – try 0.001 for unknown, 0.25 for far, 0.5 for near, and 1.0 for immediate. You can make the circle by adding an image, or by creating a view that’s 256 wide by 256 high then setting its
layer.cornerRadiusto 128 so that it’s round.
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Share your success!
One of the most effective motivators of success is sharing your progress with other people – when you tell folks what you're doing and what you've learned, it encourages you to come back for more, which in turn will help you reach your app development goals faster.
So, now that you've done all the hard work it's time to share your success: tell folks that you've completed this project, either by clicking the button below to start composing a tweet, or by writing your own message from scratch. This will definitely encourage you to keep learning, but it will also help other folks discover my work – thank you!
