Use iBeacons In Enterprise Apps Built With #Delphi XE8 Firemonkey On #Android And #IOS
Admin
Developer Sarina DuPont from Embarcadero has a blog post up which highlights the iBeacon and AltBeacon support in Delphi XE8 Firemonkey. A beacon is usually a Bluetooth Low Energy device that returns a UUID when you can for nearby beacons. You can also get the distance to the beacon. Apple has a format called iBeacon that they support from IOS devices. AltBeacon is an open format beacon and you can select in the TBeacon component which type of beacons you want to scan for. The blog post contains a link to a demo TBeacon app with UUIDs defined from the following beacon companies: Estimote, Radius Networks, BLE Home, and EM Microelectronic. There is some pretty good documentation in the Embarcadero docwiki for Using Beacons. One gotcha I noticed in the documentation is that under IOS when scanning for the Apple iBeacon format you must activate Location services by adding the following keys to the version info section of your project: NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription, NSLocationUsageDescription, and NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription. Beacons are supported on Android, IOS, and OSX but not on Windows. You should be able to use the demo and the TBeacon component in Appmethod and C++Builder as well.
