New iOS Proximity SDK sneak peek

BLE Beacons
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Hey! Last Friday we’ve published a pre-release version of iOS Estimote SDK 5 (codename Proximity SDK).

What it’s about

  • Annotate your beacons in Estimote Cloud with a JSON (Attachment, as we call it)
  • In your app, define zones (predicate for Attachment JSONs and desired range) so it can react to proximity of beacons.

Why we think it’s cool

  1. It uses Estimote Monitoring under the hood, Estimote’s algorithm for more reliable enter/exit reporting.
  2. Proximity SDK uses human-readable JSONs to annotate your beacons instead of UUID, Major, Minor, or other abstract identifiers.
  3. JSONs allow more “dimensions” of grouping — i.e. you can group your beacons by room type (kitchen, office, conference room) and by floor level.
  4. When you want to replace the beacons, all you need to do is reassign Attachments in Estimote Cloud. No need to rebuild the app or reconfigure the beacons.
  5. Proximity SDK lets you “consume” beacon signals at different ranges. The range where you get the notification doesn’t depend on packet broadcasting power anymore — you can use even a single beacon and use it to trigger notifications at far, medium and near range. Previously, you would probably use a beacon per range (three in this example).
  6. Proximity SDK is focused on “consuming” beacons easily and providing a reliable app experience. That’s all it does. In comparison with Estimote SDK 4, we shrunk the library size by 64%.

The SDK is available in our iOS SDK repo, at tag 5.0.0-alpha.1 or branch sdk_5. For more details and example app, see the README.

Feedback

We can’t wait to hear your thoughts on Proximity SDK. Feel free to post feedback in this thread, or drop us an email at contact@estimote.com.

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I was able to get up and running with the Desk Observer example quickly and it’s working well so far, nice work!

The ability to detect and act upon different ranges for the same beacon is a huge help to a current project I’m working on. I’m definitely looking forward to the next release!

Are there any plans to include Rules/Triggers for Proximity Beacons to this release of the SDK? It think it would be very interesting and powerful to combine some of the Rule and Trigger capabilities of Nearables to this SDK’s ability to consume variable ranges in a single beacon.

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Thanks for giving it a try, @joe_sarabia, I’m delighted that Proximity SDK already helped you!

Yes, we thought about implementing some kind of trigger engine for proximity events (think Nearable triggers, but renewed and used for Proximity & Location Beacons). Could you share how would you use it in your app?