DESIGN
Making your app “thumb-able"
Let's face it, phones aren't getting any smaller. I have recently got an iPhone XS Max and for me at least, it's a little too big for one-handed use. This article delves into design patterns to consider if you want to make your apps usable one-handed and "thumb-able"
The Thumb Zone by Joe Cieplinski
DEVOPS
Building Xamarin iOS library wrappers with Azure DevOps Build Pipelines
Azure DevOps, formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services or VSTS for short, allows you to create automated release pipelines for all different kind of projects. One of the nice things is that you get free build time for opensource projects. In this article, Mark automates the build of an open source IOS binding using Azure DevOps.
Building Xamarin iOS library wrappers with Azure DevOps Build Pipelines by Mark
ANDROID
Xamarin.Android - Recognize Celebrities By Camera Using Computer Vision
In this article, you will learn how to consume cognitive services for recognizing a celebrity in Xamarin.Android by using a mobile camera.
Xamarin.Android - Recognize Celebrities By Camera Using Computer Vision by Ahsan Siddique
XAMARIN FORMS
An Introduction to ImageButton
Get an introduction to the new(ish) ImageButton in Xamarin.Forms which solves many of the limitations of the original Button implementation.
Note: Post is in Spanish
Creating Custom Controls Part 2: SliderView
Luis Pujols has a series of blog posts he is writing about creating custom controls in Xamarin.Forms. In this post, he tackles creating a SliderView. But also be sure to check out his other post on writing Plugins for Xamarin
Fabulous Santa Tracker
You may not need this application for another year but if you need to track Santa next Christmas Eve, then Jim Bennett has you covered. And of course, this is written in Fabulous. For bonus points check out a podcast with Jim Bennett (note spelling) on Gone Mobile down below.
Dynamically changing the selected tab tint color in Xamarin.Forms
Since Xamarin.Forms 3.1 a TabbedPage.BarSelectedItemColor property has been introduced and we can simply use it to achieve our goal. Unfortunately on iOS we have to implement the solution ourselves. Luckily there is a TintColor property on a UITabBar that we can use.
Dynamically changing the selected tab tint color in Xamarin.Forms by Evgeny Zborovsky
PulseMusic - music player design with Skia and LibVLC
In February 2015, Anish Chandran, a Microsoft UX and Visual designer, posted on Dribble and Behance an original music player UX concept.
In August 2018, Javier Suárez Ruiz implemented and published on GitHub a Xamarin.Forms (iOS/Android) UI implementation of the audio player view of the PulseMusic concept by Anish.
In December 2019, "martz2804" turned it into a real player with with LibVLCSharp.
That's awesome!
AZURE
Using the Retry Pattern with Azure Storage from Xamarin.Forms
Some of you may use the Polly framework to provide retry and error handling for your Xamarin applications. David Britch (who has written about Polly before) is here to tell you that in Azure you can achieve something similar using the inbuilt facilities in Azure Storage.
Using the Retry Pattern with Azure Storage from Xamarin.Forms by David Britch
PODCASTS & VIDEOS
Merge Conflict 130 - 2018 Retrospective & 2019 Predictions
It is that wonderful time of the year where we get to reflect back on all of the amazing stuff from 2018 and also give our 2019 (and beyond) predictions in the world of development. We also take your questions for our end of the year lightning topics including: C# features we want, .NET Standard vs Shared Project, Xamarin.Forms 5.0, Microprocessors, and learning languages.
Gone Mobile 82: Building Fabulous Apps Using F# with Jim Bennett
It's been awhile since we've had a good F# discussion, so for our final episode of 2018 we decided to fix that. Join us as we talk to Jim Bennett about the latest and greatest in the world of F# and how it's becoming a better option than ever before for building mobile apps!
Gone Mobile 82: Building Fabulous Apps Using F# with Jim Bennett by Greg Shackles, Jonathan Dick
AND FINALLY...
Xamarin Universe: a call to action
The Xamarin Universe is an initiative that seeks to unify all resources (communities, resources, jobs, etc.) within the same environment. This initiative aims to make the community aware of those resources that Xamarin developers unknown and are highly needed.