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 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! And heck, we even launched a website for the apps: http://mys…
James Montemagno
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 Action…
James Montemagno
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
In February, my fellow Xamarin Michael James published a wonderful app for iOS called My StepCounter. This app uses the new CoreMotion apis in iOS 7 to track your steps on your iPhone 5s. This isn’t a new concept and there are plenty of devices and apps out there that do step tracking, but what makes My StepCounter special is that Michael gave it a beautiful simplistic UI & beautiful animations. On top of that he created it all to be 100% compatible with Xamarin Starter Edition! This i…
James Montemagno
