Úll Conf iOS app

Úll Conf iOS app

This year at Úll Conf I had the pleasure of working with the organisers on creating the Úll iOS app. In order to build and publish the application we used Glide – an app creation platform, which I’m working on with Chris Harris. While the key feature of Glide is easy content collation via Dropbox – which allowed us to easily publish the schedule, photographs and speaker information – we’ve been recently experimenting with Apple’s iBeacons.

The conference took place at the Lyrath hotel, in charming Kilkenny, Ireland. The venue was quite large and had several interesting facilities, that we wanted to expose to the participants of the conference.

On Tuesday morning we’ve sent out a notification and published several clues linked to each place. In each room we’ve setup a kontakt.io beacon. We configured our content to post a notification when the beacon was ranged and unlock content related to the room, which included beautiful illustrations done by Carolina Buzio.

2014-05-04 21.45.36

Overall, everything went well. A few takeaways from the experiment:

  • detecting another beacon in the same region doesn’t usually wake up the app again. One of the workarounds I’m using is continuing to range beacons in background, by requesting a background task. That obviously only works for a finite amount of time.
    Another solution is to use multiple beacons regions, but rememeber that you can track up to 20. You’ll also need re-programmable beacons! As Apple points out, you could reconfigure which regions you’re tracking based on where you are.
  • make sure people have Bluetooth turned on. Biggest “oops!” of the experiment. The app didn’t inform the users to switch on bluetooth.
  • Beacons.

    We used kontakt.io beacons supplied by @dermdaly

    dissapearing beacon bug: one of the bugs that I noticed was that often ranged beacons dissapeared several scans after they were initially ranged. In our case this wasn’t a huge problem, we just needed to range it once, but if you’re depending on the beacon to stick around on that list (while you’re actually in range), it’s a problem.

  • beacons not working until device reboot: it’s 2014 and some people still had to restart their phones in order for beacons to work. No comments here.

 

All iBeacons aside, I highly recommend both Úll Conf and Lyrath 🙂

 

Lyrath