James Montemagno

Shrink Your Android App Size with One Setting

When you are developing Android apps your app size can grow really fast. We can get so caught up in the day to day that we forget how important it is to keep down the app size of our app. It may not seem like a 20MB APK is that much, but when you have limited internet or reception it can be a real pain. As an Android developer you have to develop for multiple ABIs, add a ton of resources and translations, and of course you have you have all of your source code and dependencies. You may have a…

James Montemagno

Introducing Island Tracker for Animal Crossing New Horizons

tldr; I built a new iOS & Android app called Island Tracker [https://islandtracker.app] that enables you to track turnip prices, get predictions, and share them with friends. It is available today. Get it on: [https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1510177414?mt=8] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.refractored.islandtracker] When Animal Crossing New Horizons launched in late March I fell in love immediately. My wife adopted my Nintendo Switch Lite and we both got copies the nigh…

James Montemagno

Animate Anything with Xamarin.Forms

I have been building apps with Xamarin.Forms for nearly 6 years now! I love how it has evolved over the years, added new controls, new features, and simplified everything with Shell. While I think I can build pretty decent apps in general, one thing that I have always struggled with is animations. The very first release of Xamarin.Forms had a built in animation system [https://docs.microsoft.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms/user-interface/animation/simple] to fade, move, and scale any of the controls…

James Montemagno

Xamarin.Forms Custom Fonts Simplified & Everywhere

It was just about 1 year ago when I wrote about using font icons for images [https://montemagno.com/using-font-icons-in-xamarin-forms-goodbye-images-hello-fonts/] inside of Xamarin.Forms apps. Well time has flown by and now more than ever is the time to go all in on custom fonts and font icons because with Xamarin.Forms 4.6 everything got so much easier! Custom fonts in Xamarin.Forms ShellSee my full walkthrough: So, let's start off with the basics when it comes to fonts. You usually thin…

James Montemagno

Hello Again, My Name is James

And...... we are back! Where have I been? Inside, in Seattle! It has been around 5 months since my last update on the site and a lot of things have changed since then. Here is an update. Be safe when you get your coffeeSince my last blog here are just a few things that have happened: * We ushered in a whole new year * A global pandemic broke out [https://bing.com/covid]and continues to impact us every day * We had our largest Xamarin event of the year all online [https://www.youtube.c…

James Montemagno

Setting Android Status Bar Background & Icon Colors

Over the past few months, I have been attempting to figure out the best ways to implement a light theme and dark theme in my Hanselman.Forms app. Working closely with my friend Kym Phillpotts [https://twitter.com/kphillpotts] we came up with a very nice theme changer for Xamarin.Forms, that allowed us to change all of the colors dynamically. The result is a very nice looking application that allows the users to pick their theme or use system defaults. One thing that bugged me in the original…

James Montemagno

Investing Time in the Xamarin Linker for Smaller App Sizes

When developing an app, 99% of our time goes into writing the code, testing the functionality, and making small UI tweaks to please our end users. Most of this is done in debug mode which optimizes compilation and app size for speed, which makes sense. When we flip that flag to Release with the default settings, we often pay very little attention as to what is happening to our app. We get a nice APK or IPA and ship it up to the app store and we are done. However, if we just spent a little time f…

James Montemagno

Windows Mouse Pointer & Cursor Features for Presenting

When I present, I am constantly zooming in and out to help attendees focus in on what I am talking about. It is also nice because it makes all the text nice and large so it is easier to see from the back of the room or if someone has reduced vision. One thing that has always bothered me, is that the mouse pointer is always tiny and the typing cursor is so thin. Well, not anymore with the latest versions of Windows 10, that pack a new feature to adjust mouse & cursor size. Simply type: Window…

James Montemagno

Tags

Shrink Your Android App Size with One Setting

Introducing Island Tracker for Animal Crossing New Horizons

Animate Anything with Xamarin.Forms

Xamarin.Forms Custom Fonts Simplified & Everywhere

Hello Again, My Name is James

Setting Android Status Bar Background & Icon Colors

Investing Time in the Xamarin Linker for Smaller App Sizes

Windows Mouse Pointer & Cursor Features for Presenting

Tags