Android

Debug with the Xamarin Android Player from Visual Studio in VMWare or Parallels

I simply love using my Mac when combined with VMWare for development. I consider it the ultimate setup for mobile development with Visual Studio. Since everything is on the same machine the iOS simulator and Build Host just work. For Windows Phone nested virtualization with Hyper-V seems to just work (as long as you you follow the special setup guide from Nokia [http://developer.nokia.com/community/wiki/Windows_Phone_8_SDK_on_a_Virtual_Machine_with_Working_Emulator] ). However, my favorite pla…

James Montemagno

Announcing Bike Now on Android, for Seattle's @CyclePronto Bike Share Program

Ever since I first saw Hubway in Boston I was excited for the hopes that one day Seattle would get it’s very own bike share program. Well, 2014 is the year this happens with Pronto Cycle Share [http://www.prontocycleshare.com/] is making it a reality. I was a bit worried that there would be no official app to help track bikes around the Sound, so I decided to take up the challenge. I had a great start with Jérémie Laval’s [http://twitter.com/jeremie_laval] wonderful Moyeu [http://moyeuapp.net…

James Montemagno

Enhanced Xamarin.Android Designer with Tools Attributes

The announcement of Android L Developer Preview support [http://blog.xamarin.com/android-l-developer-preview-android-wear-support/] for Xamarin.Android developers brings tons of goodies to start playing around with, but did you know that there has been several updates to the Android designer as well? If you look through the release notes [http://developer.xamarin.com/releases/studio/xamarin.studio_5.3/xamarin.studio_5.3/] of Xamarin Studio 5.3 you will several enhancements such as the new Andro…

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

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

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

Debug with the Xamarin Android Player from Visual Studio in VMWare or Parallels

Announcing Bike Now on Android, for Seattle's @CyclePronto Bike Share Program

Enhanced Xamarin.Android Designer with Tools Attributes

Extending Xamarin.Forms Monkeys App with XAML and Images

My StepCounter for Android goes Live & Open Source!

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

James Montemagno

Tags