KYM PHILLPOTTS
Welcome back to another Weekly Xamarin. 2019 is now in full swing after everyone is back from holidays. So lots of great articles this week.
Please make sure you have a look at the Xamarin February Survey so you can share your feedback (both good and bad) with the Xamarin team.
Have a great weekend everyone!
NEWS
Xamarin and Azure Office Hours Recap from December 2018 and January 2019
Matt Soucoup has been talking to the community. He wants to hear stories of your successes and also, the not-so-successful adventures. There are so much great community reach outs that are happening from the Xamarin team, so make sure you make your voice heard.
If you’re interested in talking about anything Xamarin, mobile development or Azure related, please don’t hesitate to sign-up for an office hours session.
Xamarin and Azure Office Hours Recap from December 2018 and January 2019 by Matt Soucoup
DESIGN
4 Reasons Why You Should Design Without Color First
Creating your screens in grayscale before adding color forces you think clearly and prioritize right when it comes to UX design.
4 Reasons Why You Should Design Without Color First by Anand Satyan
PERFORMANCE
Profiling memory leaks in Xamarin Forms
In this article, Kirk discusses how to Profile your Xamarin Applications specifically detecting Memory leaks and shows you the process on how to use the Xamarin Profiler in detecting the memory leaks.
Data Startup in Mobile Applications
In mobile applications, data is a critical matter: It always has to be available and ready for your users. This is even more true for enterprise applications, if data takes a long time to load, sync or is only partially downloaded from the server, it will reflect very poorly on your product quality.
This is an introduction to a series where Daniel Causer covers issues like resuming downloads, getting your data ready and having a fast reliable solution.
Data Startup in Mobile Applications – part I by Daniel Causer
IOS
Apple Plans on Combining iPhone, iPad, Mac Apps by 2021
Apple Inc. wants to make it easier for software coders to create tools, games and other applications for its main devices in one fell swoop. The aim of the multistep initiative, code-named “Marzipan,” is that by 2021, developers will be able to build an app once and have it work on the iPhone, iPad and Mac computers. What could possibly go wrong? ;-)
Apple Plans on Combining iPhone, iPad, Mac Apps by 2021 by Mark Gurman
Introduction to Augmented Reality with ARKit
In this post, Michael Ridland dives into ARKit, we’ll find out what it is and get started with building our first augmented reality experience in ARKit. ARKit is Apple’s toolkit for building augmented reality experiences on iOS devices.
XAMARIN FORMS
Improving that Xamarin Forms startup experience
Xamarin Forms apps have a reputation for taking their time to load. (especially Android). There are amazing things being done by the Xamarin team to reduce those startup times, but what can you do to make your application startups more awesome?
Let us improve that Xamarin Forms startup experience by Mark Allibone
Tame the Bottom Tabs on Android
James Montemagno continues his discussion of Bottom Tabs in Android - specifically how to finely tune those bottom tabs on android and stop the ridiculous default Android behavior of shifting the tab icons and text.
Xamarin.Forms: Fully Customize Bottom Tabs on Android & Turn Off Shifting by James Montemagno
Xamarin ❤ F#
Jim Bennett is Fabulous and he wants you to be Fabulous too! Let him introduce you to building Xamarin.Forms apps with F# and the Fabulous framework.
Xamarin ❤ F# by Jim Bennett
Persisting Settings and Preferences with Xamarin.Essentials
An essential part of any mobile application is the ability to persist data. Sometimes that is a large amount of data that requires a database, but often it is smaller pieces of data such as settings and preferences that need to be persisted between application launches. This is where Xamarin.Essentials can help out with its wide range of cross-platform APIs for mobile apps. Specifically, the Preferences API enables you to store application preferences in a key/value store.
Persisting Settings and Preferences in Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Essentials by James Montemagno
Stunning Animations In Xamarin.Forms With Lottie
Lottie is an animation library by AirBnb that makes it super simple to add animation in any native app – web and mobile. It helps bridge the gap from designers designing an animation to developers implementing it in the app.
Stunning Animations In Xamarin.Forms With Lottie by Hussain N. Abbasi
The SearchBar control
Learn about the SearchBar in Xamarin Forms. Search bars are used in most complex applications.
Let’s use the SearchBar control in Xamarin Forms by Leomaris Reyes
Secure Storage (Xamarin.Essentials API of the Week)
Xamarin.Essentials provides developers with cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications. On this week's Essential API of the week we take a look at Secure Storage, which enables you to easily and securely save data into the system wide key store/chain.
Secure Storage (Xamarin.Essentials API of the Week) by James Montemagno
Image organization in Xamarin.Forms
Martin Zikmund has written a couple of blog posts on dealing with images in Xamar.Forms in a more elegant manner. First, [How to keep local images out of root folder of Xamarin.Forms UWP project] and in this article, he covers making psuedo folders for iOS and Android to better organise image resources.
Improved image organization in Xamarin.Forms with pseudo-folders by Martin Zikmund
PODCASTS & VIDEOS
Merge Conflict 137 - Tweaking UI to Perfection
Platform Design vs Custom Design? Fancy Animations? Hours of tweaking and tuning the user interface? Does that really make a great application? It is worth all the work that needs to go these small tiny details? We discuss!
Five Things to Love About Xamarin.Forms 3.5
This week, James is joined yet again by friend of the show David Ortinau, Xamarin SDK & Xamarin.Forms Program Manager, tells us all about the latest features to love in Xamarin.Forms 3.5.
Five Things to Love About Xamarin.Forms 3.5 by James Montemagno