Issue 180

KYM PHILLPOTTS

Another week, and another collection of great links.

As Luce mentioned last week, I was away at Microsoft HQ meetup up with colleagues past and future. It really is an amazing campus and I can highly recommend making your way there if you can.

Also coming up soon is MonkeyFest 2018, which is a global event happening around the world on November 10th. If you can, you should try and make it to one of the events.

But for now, have a great weekend everyone!

DESIGN

How to design an Apple Design award-winning app

Firstly, let me just state that I have personally never won an Apple Design Award (ADA). Not many people have. In fact, the highly prestigious award is only presented to a handful of app designers and developers from around the world at Apple’s WWDC event each year. This blog post does an analysis of what it takes to get noticed by the Apple Design Award.

How to design an Apple Design award-winning app by Joseph Russell

Get started with motion design in 9 steps

Animated means full of life and excitement. Animation adds life to static things. When it comes to software, it’s not just for delight but for solving problems.

Get started with motion design in 9 steps by Arpit Agarwal

OPEN SOURCE

What’s new in XPlat v1.4

XPlat Windows APIs is an open-source project that was created as a result of a need to port a rather large application from the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to Android using Xamarin.

Given the already existing code in the application, the solution we needed to provide was for the least code change to ensure the application could be back up and running as soon as possible.

The result is XPlat Windows APIs, a collection of cross-platform APIs designed to ease development of Xamarin applications with Windows-like APIs.

What’s new in XPlat v1.4 by James Croft

ANDROID

Google Play - Academy for App Success

Free training for Android developers. Learn how to succeed on Google Play. Lots of information and best practices about releasing your applications onto Google Play store

Academy for App Success

IOS

Why Shortcuts Matter for Accessibility

Since it was announced at WWDC over the summer, the lion’s share of conversation around shortcuts has been about getting things done quickly and efficiently. There are also implications for accessibility. You should consider adding shortcuts into your app.

Why Shortcuts Matter for Accessibility by Steven Aquino

XAMARIN FORMS

Using "Unsupported" DI Containers with Prism

Developers around the world rely on Prism to build some pretty amazing apps. When I first saw Prism I was amazed at how quickly and easily I could develop an application with complex needs, but with easy to follow, testable, and maintainable code. As is so often the case, developers tend to have very strong opinions. Which Dependency Injection Container to use is certainly no exception. To some extent developers choices come from what they have experience with.

For a variety of reasons the Prism team cannot support every container that developers may want to use. Prism 7 however made some major changes that make it easier than ever to use a container that isn't officially supported or shipped by the Prism team.

Also, a big congratulations to the Prism team who have now surpassed 5 Million downloads! Awesome work!

Using "Unsupported" DI Containers with Prism by Dan-Siegel

Muchos Converters

Thiago Bertuzzi shares a bunch of converters which you might find useful in your Forms Apps.

Note: Page is in Portugese

O X do Xamarin Forms — Mascara de Moeda (Currency), Converters em Ação! by Thiago Bertuzzi

Xamarin.Forms Succinctly

Our good friends at Syncfusion have a new Xamarin.Forms Succinctly ebook written by Alessandro Del Sole.

Xamarin.Forms Succinctly by Alessandro Del Sole

Building a Business Intelligence App using Xamarin.Forms

The MyBI application is a business intelligence application that loads sales data from a Google Sheet. The BI app then summarizes it and produces a simple and effective dashboard that can be used on mobile devices as well as on the desktop.

Building a Business Intelligence App using Xamarin.Forms by Kelley Ricker

Xamarin Universal Library

This is a great github repo that is a universal library that contains everything we need to know about the Xamarin universe. It has been growing rapidly and is an excellent resource to find books, videos, and other materials.

xamarinuniverse/XamarinUniversalLibrary

Hide Scrollbars for ListView with ScrollBarVisibility

Gerald Versluis discusses an upcoming enhancement to control the Scrollbar visibility in a LIstView. Massive props to Gerald for continuing to contribute to the Xamarin.Forms code base.

Hide Scrollbars for ListView with ScrollBarVisibility by Gerald

Saving Xamarin.Forms

Adam Pedley provides an interesting no holds barred perspective on what he sees as the pros and cons of Xamarin.Forms and potential roads ahead.

Saving Xamarin.Forms by Adam Pedley

Xamarin.Forms Compiled Bindings FAQ

Bindings aren’t cost efficient because they are resolved at runtime using reflection. In some scenarios this can introduce a performance hit. In addition, there isn’t any compile-time validation of binding expressions, and so invalid bindings aren’t detected until runtime.

Compiled bindings aim to improve data binding performance in Xamarin.Forms applications by resolving binding expressions at compile-time, rather than runtime. As well as providing compile-time validation of binding expressions, more importantly they eliminate the reflection used to resolve the bindings at runtime.

Long story short, you should learn about them and use them in your applications.

Xamarin.Forms Compiled Bindings FAQ by David Britch

Creating a Hyperlink in Xamarin.Forms II

I have always wanted to add hyperlinks to my applications and this post from David Britch, Content Writer for Microsoft and formerly Xamarin teaches us all how you can extend the Span class to achieve just that!

AI

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 focuses on how to make prediction with text input.

MachineLearning with CoreML and Xamarin.iOS by dhindrik

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

The Xamarin Show - Visual Studio for Mac 7.6 & 7.7 Updates!

This week, James is joined by friend of the show Jordan Matthiesen, Visual Studio for Mac program manager, who shows us all of the new and fancy features in Visual Studio for Mac.

Visual Studio for Mac 7.6 & 7.7 Updates! by James Montemagno

Gone Mobile: Gone Mobile 79: Flutter with Thomas Burkhart

Flutter is a hot topic among Xamarin developers at the moment. Both Thomas and I were at Xamarin Expert Day in Cologne recently and I listened to his talk on Flutter. It was interesting and definitely thought provoking. In this episode of Gone Mobile, Greg and Jon talk Flutter with Thomas and learn what it is like to program in Dart!

Merge Conflict: 121: Real Time Communication

As developers we don't always want to talk to people. But what if we want our apps to communicate in real time? In this week's episode, James and Frank get fancy with real-time communication protocols including WebSockets, MQTT, and the elusive SignalR for web and mobile apps.