James Montemagno

June 26th, 2015

8 Weeks of Travel: Dev Days, Conferences, Podcasts, & More!

It has been a few busy months! For the last two months I have been in the air and on the road talking all about cross-platform mobile development with Xamarin, and it has been a blast! Our first leg of Xamarin Dev Days [http://www.xamarin.com/dev-days] is just about to wrap up and it has been an absolutely amazing experience meeting so many incredible developers. I can’t wait to do it all again very very soon :) Then comes the list of conferences! //Build, Ignite, Chicago Coder Conference, Dev…

James Montemagno

Xamarin.Forms Image Caching in XAML

A lot of mobile applications have to deal with Images. There are a lot of awesome libraries for iOS and Android that will automatically download, optimize, and cache your images for you from a single line or two of code. Xamarin.Forms actually handles all of this for you automatically when you give the Image’s Source property an Image URL. You can read through the awesome documentation on the Xamarin developer portal [http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/working-with/…

James Montemagno

May 31st, 2015

Xamarin Studio: Obliterate Output Paths (bin/obj)

Recently, I have fallen in love with Xamarin Studio add-ins and in my last blog post I took a look at how to edit markdown files easily. I was at Google I/O last week with Jérémie Laval [https://twitter.com/jeremie_laval] and Jon Dick [https://twitter.com/redth] and he was working on binding the new awesome support libraries from Google and Jérémie and I saw Jon do something interesting…. Obliterate Output Paths from inside of Xamarin Studio’s context menus. Immediately, we wanted to know exa…

James Montemagno

Editing Markdown in Xamarin Studio

I can’t help myself I really love Xamarin Studio. Don’t get me wrong I still love Visual Studio for everything that it does, but with Xamarin Studio 5.9 [http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin.studio-5.9-enhancements/] the best mobile focused IDE just keeps getting better. However, did you know that you don’t have to wait for new releases of Xamarin Studio to get new features? Xamarin Studio has an entire ecosystem of awesome plugins to extend the IDE and I just stumbled upon one that solves one of my…

James Montemagno

Generating Android Color Palettes Super Fast with Rev 22.1

Google went on a spree a few weeks back updating all of their support libraries to rev 22.1. If you haven’t read about all the changes be sure to read through the official Android Developer’s blog for a full breakdown [http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/04/android-support-library-221.html] . The most drastic change to the support libraries was to v7 AppCompat with the new AppCompatActivity, but there were several other enhancement to the libraries including one of my favorite Palette. I…

James Montemagno

1 Million Developers, Xamarin.Forms UAP, & I'm Speaking at Build!

Whoa! What an amazing day! Today Xamarin reached 1 Million Developer downloads [http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-passes-1-million-developer-milestone/], released awesome new Xamarin.Forms goodness, and tons of other updates to kick off Build. If you didn’t see the full announcement be sure to check it out on the Xamarin Blog [http://blog.xamarin.com]. If you are here at Build I hope that you are sporting that awesome Xamarin shirt from the Xamarin Build party. I am honored to be giving two pr…

James Montemagno

Material Design Theming for Xamarin.Forms Android Apps

Update: As of Xamarin.Forms 1.5.1 Material Design AppCompat is included! See the official blog to convert your app: https://blog.xamarin.com/material-design-for-your-xamarin-forms-android-apps/ I am an extremely big fan of Material Design for Android applications. Case and point is this tweet that I sent out last night: > I wish the entire world was themed with Material Design. — James Montemagno (@JamesMontemagno) April 4, 2015 [https://twitter.com/JamesMontemagno/status/5841695007082168…

James Montemagno

Android Parallax Made Easy

You may have seen some of my tweets recently about the upcoming release of Coffee Filter 2.0 with some awesome new features. Before I release any Android app I always send it off to my good friend Jérémie Laval [http://twitter.com/jeremie_laval]to do a full UI review. We both love Android and Material Design and he always gives me the best pointers on how to improve my apps. On my details page I setup a complex view with an image on the background that sits behind a ScrollView for the content. I…

James Montemagno

Tags

8 Weeks of Travel: Dev Days, Conferences, Podcasts, & More!

Xamarin.Forms Image Caching in XAML

Xamarin Studio: Obliterate Output Paths (bin/obj)

Editing Markdown in Xamarin Studio

Generating Android Color Palettes Super Fast with Rev 22.1

1 Million Developers, Xamarin.Forms UAP, & I'm Speaking at Build!

Material Design Theming for Xamarin.Forms Android Apps

Android Parallax Made Easy

Tags