James Montemagno
James Montemagno

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James Montemagno
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ProgressButton for Xamarin.Android

I was browsing through some Android Views [http://www.androidviews.net] and stumbled across a very familiar view, the ProgressButton [http://f2prateek.com/progressbutton/]. I have seen this plenty of times in just about every Google Play app. It is very simple with multiple arches of color and a drawable resource to let you know if you have pinned it or not. So last night and this morning I decided to port it over to Xamarin.Android. It is extremely easy to use as part of my MonoDroid Toolkit…

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LegacyBar: Your MonoDroid ActionBar

Android is kind of a beast, interesting and complex. One of my favorite features of Android has to be their implementation of the Actionbar, which they started in ICS 3.0. If you are a native Java programmer using the action bar is great, and if you need to target android 2.X devices there are some great libraries that give you backwards compatibility. If you are like me, a C# developer using Mono for Android [http://www.xamarin.com] then it isn’t that easy. When I started developing apps I s…

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Weather Underground + Android made simple

In a hung for integrating weather into one of my apps I looked at all of the different weather APIs out there. In this hunt I also wanted to find an easy client wrapper as well. My favorite solution thus far has to be the Weather Underground [http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api] and 47Deg [https://github.com/47deg/android-wunderground-client] client. A simple jar to just drop in with a very easy and intuitive interface. Based on open source RESTrung library it is fast and efficient. Just w…

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Windows 8 WMC/Media Player Fix Error C00D11B1

Alright so a weird one tonight, basically I have tons of m2ts and avi files which just have AC3 audio usually in them, or even lesser in the avi. I had no issues playing these files on my Windows 7 HTPC or even my Windows 8 laptop. However I recently wiped the win7 htpc and installed WIndows 8 Pro with Media Center. Now ALL of my Live and Recorded TV works just fine, but when I try to play back these ripped files WMC just says can not open file and Media Player throws error C00D11B1. Now Microso…

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Windows 8 Themes and High Contrast

Themes and High Contrast are easy to do on Windows 8. Light and Dark are at your disposal, but don’t forget about implementing High Contrast, it is easy! You can change your accents colors very easy by using HAMMER [https://github.com/Code52/HAMMER] to get rid of the default Purple colors. I made a short video:…

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Market your Windows 8 and iOS apps easily on your site

So you have an app for Windows 8 or maybe even an app for iOS. How great would it be if someone was searching inside of IE on Windows 8 or Safari on iOS that when they got to your website it had an option to download and install it easily. They wouldn’t have to search your site for a button, or search the store, with 1 click they are taken directly to the download and install page. Well you can, and it is really easy. To me it is very odd that a lot of sites just don’t do this already. For in…

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App releases and what happens to those developers

Development cycles are extremely interesting, you have an idea and a core problem that you are out to solve. Early on in development you will study other apps, core user interface designs, and really map out your application. After this it is time to code and get serious. The following months you set a core foundation that you will build the apps off of, core user interface principles you want to implement, and of course start knocking features off one at a time. Fast forward a few months, y…

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Windows 8 Live Tile Branding

After implementing live tiles I found something extremely interesting. When live tiles are active you never really get to go back to your standard tile with your app logo and name. Switching from wide to standard will flash you logo quickly, but after that it is gone. This seems just fine, but demoing my app to a few people and showing them live tiles they brought up a point… “How do I know which tile is the app?” From a developer point of view I never really thought of this because it is sho…

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James Montemagno

James Montemagno

Tags

Xamarin Xamarin.Forms Coffee Plugins NuGet Visual Studio C# XAML Android iOS Video Games Awesome Podcast DevOps Azure