Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
On my recent visit out to Tonto National Forest to visit one of my best friends, Luke Karrys, I started to realize the importance of trying to keep your app size down when shipping Android apps to Google Play. Working from the middle of the forest is relaxing, productive, and just plain fun, but there is one huge issue, internet and cell reception barely exists in the the middle of no where.
James Montemagno
When iOS 7 was introduced Apple allowed your application to extend all the way up into the status bar region. This was neat because you can scroll content behind it, change the color, and make the entire screen feel completely full. One thing that has upset me is that it isn’t really straight forward as to how to change the color of the time, carrier, battery, and other icons that live in the status bar. So here is …
James Montemagno
I have been a .NET developer for over a decade and worked in a wide variety of industries including games, printer software, web services, and more. A little over three years ago I decided to move my entire life from Phoenix, AZ to the most wonderful place in the world Seattle, WA for a brand new job. That new job was to be the lead and only mobile developer at Ceton. My first assignment was to create a series of …
James Montemagno
During this weeks Xamarin.Forms 1.3 webinar I received an interesting question about how you can force your mobile applications to always use a specific orientation. This is actually easy to accomplish on each platform with just a few settings in each project. Let’s take a look: Android First thing to do is open up your MainActivity.cs file. At the very top you will see an [Activity] attribute. This attribute is used …
James Montemagno
I was overly excited when I got news that our amazing component team had finished the latest binding for AppCompat v7 rev 21! This was exciting to me because this meant that any developer could now introduce material design to their Android app and target older devices all the way back to API 7 (although you should just target API 15). I got busy migrating Bike Now over to AppCompat since it used the navigation …
James Montemagno
I recently published a few blogs on how to add pull to refresh to your Xamarin.Forms iOS and Android applications. This sparked a question from another developer as to if you could swipe to load more at the bottom of the ListView. My feedback here is that a swipe to load more isn’t normal in mobile applications. A quick work around is to have a button as the final cell that is pressed to load more, but even better …
James Montemagno
I fell in love with material design the moment I saw it and at Evolve 2014 my good friend and co-worker Jérémie Laval and I actually gave 2 sessions on the concept and implementation of material design in your apps. With the introduction of v7 app compat library rev 21 you are now able to upgrade your apps while maintain compatibility with older versions of Android. If you are looking to get started integrating the …
James Montemagno
I hope that everyone has been having a wonderful holiday season. Over the last month I have had one large goal; to create a plethora of Plugins for Xamarin. This desire to create plugins started a long time ago when I created my very first NuGet packages for cross platform settings. Once I iterated on the plugin and saw how successful and helpful it was I knew right away that I wanted to create more, which is where …
James Montemagno
James Montemagno is a Principal Lead Program Manager for Developer Community at Microsoft. He has been a .NET developer since 2005, working in a wide range of industries including game development, printer software, and web services. Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
