Bringing a new product to life often starts with a meeting between designers, product managers, engineers, and businesspeople. Meetings can accomplish a lot, but they can also distract from the actual work of building something new. At Estimote, we have our fair share of meetings but we prefer to build things rather than talk about them and we believe a single prototype is worth more than a thousand whiteboard sessions. Many developers feel the same way, so we want to give you tools that enable rapid prototyping of beacon-enabled apps and dramatically shorten the learning curve for the Estimote SDK. So we’re excited to introduce our new App Templates in Estimote Cloud.
Source: Dilbert
Time is money
Prototyping is the way to get a project going. It gives you a glimpse into how a product will work and feel, what it can accomplish, and where are its limits. Prototypes also give you something to iterate and improve upon. Crucially, a working prototype is the best way to get meaningful feedback. Testing sessions and focus groups in which participants can interact with a semi-working product are always better than reacting to wireframes and design mockups.
But prototyping is hard. Before your developers build anything, they need to find and test proper tools. They need to read the documentation for APIs and SDKs. Then when they finally get to work, development takes twice as long as estimated. That’s not an indictment of your team, it’s just the reality of how complex it is to build good software. Just take a look at this Quora discussion on why software development estimations are often way off.
Prototyping with iBeacon is no different. In fact, it can be even harder given beacons are a relatively new technology. The learning curve can be intimidating. By adding the physical world as another layer of UX, developing beacon-enabled apps introduces complexities you didn’t need to consider previously.
So development of your project takes longer than expected. Deadlines pass, frustration grows. But it doesn’t have to be like that. That’s why we’re releasing App Templates in Estimote Cloud: a tool for rapid prototyping with iBeacon. Build and release a functional demo in minutes, not days or weeks.
Introducing App Templates
Check out the Apps section of Estimote Cloud to see the new App Templates feature, where you can download a working code sample in just a few clicks. The templates have the Estimote SDK integrated, as well as your beacons’ UUIDs and API tokens for accessing Estimote Cloud API. You can open them in Xcode or Android Studio and keep working on top of the predefined project.
Need an Objective-C demo that triggers the lock screen icon based on beacons? No problem, you’re just a few clicks away. Maybe you want to use Swift to have your app to scan for multiple beacons in range and adjust content based on the closest one? Easy as pie. Or would you rather see how background Monitoring looks in Java? Just download a template and voila!
Templates aren’t just about shortening your development cycle. We’re also deeply passionate about onboarding and educating new Estimote users, so we’ve taken special care to make all templates easy to read, understand, and tweak to your liking. Newcomers will find it easier than ever to become iBeacon pros.
Templates currently available in App Generator:
Lock Screen Icon: show the app’s icon on the lock screen when in range of a beacon (iOS only).
Notification: show a notification when entering and exiting beacon’s range.
Proximity Content for a Single Beacon: show different content when in and out of range of a beacon.
Proximity Content for Multiple Beacons: show different content next to different beacons. Blank: blank project with Estimote SDK readily integrated.
Now you can have a functional piece of software to work on before you write a single line of code yourself. And we’re just getting started. In the near future you can expect templates for nearables, Indoor Location SDK, Eddystone, and more.
Give it a try, become a contributor
The first version of App Templates has been available for a couple of weeks and we’ve spent a lot of time talking to early adopters to better understand their needs. We now see around 100 apps generated every week, but that’s just the start. We want our community of over 50,000 developers to participate in building this product, which is why App Templates is open to external contributors.
We’ve been blown away by the activity of our community members throughout the last two years. Tutorials, plugins, bindings: you’ve been constantly delivering outstanding software (just see the list of third party resources in our Knowledge Base). We want to make it easier for you to help other developers in the community. So if you’d like to share an app template via App Templates, follow the instructions right here.
Ready to play with the App Templates? Well, it’s definitely better than the meeting you have scheduled for later today. Just log into Estimote Cloud and go to the Apps section. And as always, if you have any questions or ideas to share, we can’t wait to hear them! Drop us a line, post on forums, or tweet @Estimote and we’ll get back to you within a day.
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote