LUCE CARTER
A bit of a quiet week here at Weekly Xamarin, but still plenty to share.
I have had a great week since the last issue. I was in Cologne, Germany speaking at Xamarin Expert Day where I got to meet Mike James at last. Mike is a Xamarin veteran and now Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft.
Kym is currently in Seattle having lots of meetings with his colleagues to help make Xamarin tooling and Xamarin University even more awesome than it already is!
I hope you all have a great weekend! I am off to a Hackathon here in Manchester, hoping to create a Time Travel hack. If it works I will come back here to this point in time and write my success in this box ;)
NEWS
Telerik developer tools get many new .NET components
Many of you may already know of Telerik and all the variety of components they make available to us as developers allowing us to put more complex features into our apps including grids and charts. This week they announced over 20 new components including new themes. Shiny! Telerik developer tools get many new .NET components
DESIGN
How To Design For Grandma
This post is talking about websites but the same applies for mobile apps. No matter your target audience, ensuring your app is usable by the least experienced users will always pay off. How to design for Grandma
BUSINESS & MARKETING
Reasons Your Mobile App Retention Rate Might Be So Low
It’s an exciting time when your mobile app is ready to launch, but be careful. No matter how high you see those app store downloads go, don’t go rushing to celebrate just yet. There’s a more meaningful metric you should be paying attention to in order to determine the success of your app, and that’s the mobile app retention rate.
OPEN SOURCE
ACR Background Jobs Plugin Plugin for Xamarin & Windows
In this awesome plugin from Allan Ritchie, you have an amazing amount of control over your background tasks running on iOS, Android, UWP and any other platform supporting .Net Standard 2.0 or above.
IOS
MachineLearning with CoreML and Xamarin.iOS
In iOS 11, Apple introduced CoreML. CoreML makes it possible to do prediction on trained models locally on iOS devices. This blog post will focus on how to make prediction with text input. MachineLearning with CoreML and Xamarin.iOS by Daniel Hindrikes
MAC
Auto launching Xamarin Mac apps at login
Do you have apps you have written for Xamarin.Mac and been wondering how you can get them to start at login? Let Damian Mehers show you how! Auto launching Xamarin Mac apps at login by Damian Mehers
XAMARIN FORMS
Xamarin.Forms Compiled Bindings FAQ
Microsoft recently announced compiled bindings for Xamarin.Forms. They aim to improve the performance of your applications by resolving your data bindings at compilation rather than at runtime. I don't know about you but I am regularly making a mistake in my XAML bindings and not realising until I run the application. Compiled bindings save you from that by telling you before you run it that something isn't right. This post from David Britch is a great high level FAQ of all things compiled bindings!
Xamarin.Forms 3.3.0: Little Things, Huge Difference
Xamarin.Forms 3.3.0 is here and with it lots more awesome enhancements. Lots of love for labels and improvement of image performance on Android. Plus for those of you who love iOS, the WKWebView you may know as the successor to UIWebView is now available. Read this post to find out more about all this and more of the great stuff in a release near you!
Hide Scrollbars for ListView with ScrollBarVisibility
This PR from Gerald Versluis just got merged into master on the Xamarin.Forms repository. With this change, you can disable showing the scrollbars with the ScrollBarVisibility enum for the ListView control. This was done before for the ScrollView, but not the ListView. This should be available in a Xamarin.Forms nightly build soon for iOS, Android, Mac OS, UWP and WPF. Hide Scrollbars for ListView with ScrollBarVisibility by Gerald Versluis
PODCASTS & VIDEOS
Merge Conflict: 120: Rapid Fire Topics
We are back to lightning topics this week covering all of the things you wanted us to talk about. We chat about the late Paul Allen and his impact on Seattle, open source projects, self-promotion, rapid topics, and much more.