KYM PHILLPOTTS
Hi Everyone!
It's a big week for releases:
- Xamarin.Forms 3.6 hitting stable with a surprise Visual inclusion.
- Visual Studio Mac 2019 preview which brings multiple instances finally! yay!
This week, as always, we have lots of great community articles, so please relax and read-on!
Also, don't forget today is International Women's Day around the world. What are you doing to celebrate and help bring about gender equality?
Hope you all have a fantastic weekend.
❤
Weekly Xamarin Team!
DESIGN
Fundamental design principles for non-designers
This one is for all the content creators out there who can’t afford to pay a professional designer, as well as for non-designers on a team where designers are always too busy to help. If you can follow these simple steps, I guarantee your designs will look better.
Fundamental design principles for non-designers by Anna 4erepawko Mészáros
TESTING
Best Practices and Tips for Using Xamarin.UITest
UITest is great for automating the UI testing of your mobile applications, but in the end, it's all just code. Like any code, there are good practices and bad practices. If you are writing UI Tests, you should have a look at this article to make sure your testing code is clean and maintainable.
Best Practices and Tips for Using Xamarin.UITest by Sweeky Satpathy
ANDROID
Even more Android Bottom Navigation View
Super quick article by James on his continuing quest to control the Android Bottom Navigation Bar. This time he talks about how to control the size of the text on a tab when a user selects it.
I expect to see a book from James sometime in the near future called something like "Professional Android Bottom Navigation Bar in Action".
Control Text Size on Android Bottom Navigation View by James Montemagno
XAMARIN FORMS
All about the new Visual feature
This week, Xamarin.Forms 3.6 shipped with another round of improvements, the most exciting of which is called Visual. Visual enables developers to create beautiful, cross-platform mobile applications that share not only a massive amount of code but also design and behavior.
Beautiful Material Design for Android & iOS by David Ortinau
Xamarin.Forms Grid Spans
Martin talks about an interesting difference he found between Xamarin.Forms Grid spans and other platforms. Don't over span, people!
How a simple row or column span can make or break your Xamarin.Forms Grid by Martin Zikmund
ListView Scrolling Up/Down Detection
Here is an easy way to detect which way your user is moving within a ListView inside Xamarin.Forms.
Xamarin.Forms ListView Scrolling Up/Down Detection by Ian Vink
Interact with Javascript from C# using Xamarin.Forms
Learn how to interact between Javascript and C#, to make a web page to invoke C# code in our Xamarin.Forms apps.
Interact with Javascript from C# using Xamarin.Forms by Juan Maria Lao
Unselected and Selected Tab Color
Gerald walks through how he implemented the UnselectedTabColor and SelectedTabColor for the Xamarin.Forms TabbedPage.
He has been doing amazing jobs on contributing to the Xamarin.Forms code base, but I think we need a community intervention to talk about his color choices. ;)
Unselected and Selected Tab Color for TabbedPage in Xamarin.Forms by Gerald
Modernizing Hanselman.Forms
James is modernising the Hanselman app with all the nice new shiny features of Xamarin.Forms. In this blog post he details some of the changes he has been doing. Also remember, you can see him do all this live on his Twitch Stream
Modernizing Hanselman.Forms: A Customizable Brand Mobile App by James Montemagno
Tooltips in Xamarin Forms
Rendy has shows how to use some nuget binding libraries he found to create a cool Tooltip effect in Xamarin.Froms
PODCASTS & VIDEOS
Gone Mobile 84: Creating Apps From Spreadsheets Using Glide with Jason Smith and Mark Probst
Creating apps from spreadsheets? You bet! In this episode we're joined by Jason Smith and Mark Probst, formerly of Xamarin/Microsoft, to talk about their new endeavor called Glide. Glide's goal is to let you build beautiful, data-powered apps quickly and easily, so tune in to learn what it's all about!
Gone Mobile 84: Creating Apps From Spreadsheets Using Glide with Jason Smith and Mark Probst by Greg Shackles, Jonathan Dick
Accelerometer (Xamarin.Essentials API of the Week)
On this week's Essential API of the week we take a look at Accelerometer, which enables you monitor the device's accelerometer sensor, which indicates the acceleration of the device in three-dimensional space.
Accelerometer (Xamarin.Essentials API of the Week) by James Montemagno
Merge Conflict 139 - Foldables == Tablets on Demand
Regardless if you want a foldable phone or not they are coming! In fact they are here today with new devices from Samsung and Huawei! We give our thoughts on the foldable revolution and their impact on mobile application development.
RELEASES
Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Preview
Preview 3 release of Visual Studio 2019 for Mac is out. This is the next release of our IDE for .NET Developers on the Mac. You can download it now or use the in-product update feature if you already have a previous preview release installed.
Xamarin.Forms 3.6: Visual Has Materialized
Hot diggity-dog! Xamarin.Forms 3.6 is here. It includes the usual enhancements and bug fixes, but also the Visual feature has moved from experimental to stable status.