James Montemagno

March 27, 2021
XAML
5 min read

Code Generation from XAML in Visual Studio is Mind-blowing Awesome

The more and IDE or code editor can do for you the better I say. Visual Studio has been crushing it with new refactorings, IntelliSense, and IntelliCode, one of my favorite features ever. One thing that I have always been hoping for as a XAML developer is deeper connectivity between the XAML and the View-Model. We have seen increased IntelliSense in this area, but with the release of Visual Studio 2019 v16.9 comes …

James Montemagno

Cross-Platform In-App Purchases for Xamarin.Mac Apps!

This week, one of my best friends Frank Krueger released his brilliant app iCircuit 3D for macOS (he also wrote an awesome blog on how it was made). While I know that catalyst support for Xamarin (and .NET MAUI) is coming soon, I still think there are great opportunities to monetize macOS apps written in C# today (see iCircuit 3D!). I released my In-App Billing Plugin a few years ago for iOS, Android, and UWP apps …

James Montemagno

How-to Integrate Helpful Support Emails in Mobile Apps with Insightful Data & Logs

In the mad rush to finish my most recent app, My Cadence, I forgot to integrate an essential feature. A feature that enables my users to easily get a hold of me to report issues or request features, which is of course email support. Both Google Play and the App Store enable you to supply a support website and email, however this is a very lack luster experience for both you and your users. For your users they need to …

James Montemagno

Introducing My Cadence for Arduino, a DIY Cadence Display for Indoor Cycling

It is official, my holiday hacking is officially complete! This past week I started and launched a brand new app called My Cadence for both iOS & Android. This simple cadence display app is a perfect pair for my recent $400 DIY spin bike that I have been using for Peloton and Apple Fitness+ classes. However, my holiday hacking wasn't complete until I brought My Cadence to a third and final platform... Arduino! …

James Montemagno

Asking for app reviews really works! It just takes 1 line of code!

Last week I launched a new app called My Cadence for both iOS and Android. Even though it was a quick app that only took me a week or so to build and ship, I still followed my checklist of best practices to ensure as much success as I could. I of course did real world testing myself and with TestFlight users, I tested light and dark theme modes, and I even put in-app purchases in from the start! Even with all of …

James Montemagno

Porting My Cadence to Android in 1 Day!

It seems like it was just yesterday that I was writing up a blog post on how I was launching My Cadence for iOS and then blogging about how I wrote and shipped the app in under a week. Well, it wasn't yesterday, but it was just 5 days ago! After I shipped the iOS version, I was watching some HGTV on Hulu and thought to myself, "how long would it take me to ship this app on Android?". The answer is around 4 …

James Montemagno

Donating $250 to Warm Hearts Winter Drive Thanks to Hacker News!

A little over a week ago I published a blog post on how I put together a DIY spin bike for Peloton & Apple Fitness+ classes for under $400, and to my surprise it got shared on Hacker News! It was not only shared, but it got upvoted and at the peak it was ranked at number 7 of all Hacker News articles for the day! It was a wild ride watching the real time traffic for my site continue to see a bump for a full 36 …

James Montemagno

Building, testing, & shipping My Cadence for iOS in less than a week

My holiday hacking came early this year when I decided to build my own DIY spin bike. Soon, after a few rides, my mind started to swirl with app ideas of how to improve my ride. Then when Apple released Apple Fitness+ without support for displaying cadence information from sensors I knew I had to build an app. That app is My Cadence, which connects to a small cadence sensor and displays the current cadence. It is …

James Montemagno

James Montemagno

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