James Montemagno

Extending Xamarin.Forms Monkeys App with XAML and Images

Last week I posted an introduction to Xamarin.Forms article [http://blog.xamarin.com/meet-xamarin.forms-3-native-uis-1-shared-code-base/] on the Xamarin blog. I went over a simple master/detail flow with a list of monkeys that data bound to a ListView, and then navigate to a detail view displaying more information about the monkey when selected. It was a pretty simple implementation and I wanted to dive deeper into adding functionality. XAML Please! While the blog post got a great response, I…

James Montemagno

Pull To Refresh for Xamarin.Forms iOS

Update Xamarin.Forms now includes Pull To Refesh out of the box. Please read my article on it. If you have read my blog then you know that I love pull to refresh functionality in all of my apps. Your users are expecting this functionality in all of their apps and I believe that it should be drop dead simple to bing pull to refresh to an MVVM style of development. Xamarin.Forms shines in a lot of areas and the team has made it really easy to extend the built in controls or add brand new contr…

James Montemagno

How To Get A Great App Icon: The Fiverr Experiment

As a developer I wouldn’t say I am the greatest graphic designer in the world. I mean I can stumble around Photoshop and make some sweet gradients and feather a few things, but that is about the extent of it. Over the last few years I have been pretty lucky to have a graphics design team at my back to make any image assets I needed and of course lay down the final App Icons that ship to the stores. Here are a few great app Icons that I didn’t have to create: Now that I create apps in my spare…

James Montemagno

My StepCounter for Android goes Live & Open Source!

The past two weeks have been an absolute joy to take Michael James’ My StepCounter app for iOS and bring it to Android with C# and Xamarin. I have been quietly working out of my own personal fork [https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/My-StepCounter] trying out the latest Android KitKat sensor and user interface APIs. I ran a very successful beta test with nearly 40 people with great feedback and I am extremely proud to announce that My StepCounter is available today on Google Play [https://play.go…

James Montemagno

4 Days, 4 Developer Group Talks in Vancouver, BC!

I’m hitting the road again, but this time to Vancouver, BC from April 22nd to 25th for 4 different developer group talks on Xamarin! So if you are in the area make sure to come see me if you have some time. Here is where I will be: April 22nd 6:30PM: .NET BC (Burnaby, BC) Topic: Cross Platform Mobile Development for the C# Developer with Xamarin More info & Register Here [http://www.netbc.ca/DNCal/EventDetail.aspx?date=2014/04/22] April 23rd 6:30PM: Victoria App Developer Group (Victoria,…

James Montemagno

Shared Code Projects in VS: Windows Phone, Windows Store, and Xamarin!

At Build, Microsoft announced Shared Code Projects to simplify how developers are sharing code between platforms. We have had official portable class library support for Xamarin apps since late last year and it has been wonderful, however once you mix WP8 into the mix the PCL profiles get a bit limited. Shared Code Projects attempt to fix this by allowing you to create a project that are a shell for code that can be added into any project. It is basically glorified file linking with a nice UI to…

James Montemagno

Part 3: My StepCounter Android: Pretty UI!

I am no UI expert that is for sure, but I really like what Michael James did with the iOS version of My StepCounter. He made a nice background that changed colors from Red to Green, had a chromeless UI, and utilized very nice fonts. I want to take advantage of some of the work he did and also customize it for android. Transparent ActionBar I Wanted to ensure that the full screen was being utilized for this app, but still wanted to take advantage of the unique actions that I can put in the Actio…

James Montemagno

Part 2: My StepCounter Android: Step Counting in a Bound Service

In Step 1 of bringing My StepCounter to Android I investigate the raw sensor APIs available in Android. It was extremely nice to see that it was easy to tap into the step counter and detectors by simply implementing: ISensorEventListener and register for events. In my first example I was doing this all in my Main Activity, which seems like it would be alright if I was using step counter since it would return a total count since I registered for events, but I would have no way of detecting the cu…

James Montemagno

Tags

Extending Xamarin.Forms Monkeys App with XAML and Images

Pull To Refresh for Xamarin.Forms iOS

How To Get A Great App Icon: The Fiverr Experiment

My StepCounter for Android goes Live & Open Source!

4 Days, 4 Developer Group Talks in Vancouver, BC!

Shared Code Projects in VS: Windows Phone, Windows Store, and Xamarin!

Part 3: My StepCounter Android: Pretty UI!

Part 2: My StepCounter Android: Step Counting in a Bound Service

Tags