It has been a bit over a year since I first introduced my Xamarin.Android Templates pack for Visual Studio and things sure have changed in the world of Android since then. Early on the templates pack only introduced a few item templates for menu items and a simple implementation of the Navigation Drawer, my favorite way to navigate in Android. Then this March Google went and changed everything with AppCompat and the introduction of the new Toolbar. I rushed to update all of my templates to inclu…
James Montemagno
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 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 wonderful Moyeu and morphing it for the Pronto Cycle. Since Jérémie’s project was open source and buil…
James Montemagno
The announcement of Android L Developer Preview 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 of Xamarin Studio 5.3 you will several enhancements such as the new Android L & Wear themes and devices, but also support for Action Bar menu icons and navigation style via the menu and actionBarNavMode XML attributes. More informat…
James Montemagno
There have been a lot of exciting announcements recently from Xamarin for developers. First, is that Xamarin Indie now has a monthly subscription option for just $25 a month! Then there was the release of Xamarin Studio 5.2, which brought awesome new features such as side-by-side editing and awesome new NuGet updates. I have been a Visual Studio user for probably over 10 years and I have been using Xamarin Studio for nearly 3 years now. I have to say I find myself more and more developing on my…
James Montemagno
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 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
