• Author

James Montemagno

Live, Love, Bike, and Code

274 posts

Introducing Island Tracker for Animal Crossing New Horizons

tldr; I built a new iOS & Android app called Island Tracker that enables you to track turnip prices, get predictions, and share them with friends. It is available today. Get it on: When Animal Crossing New Horizons launched in late March I fell in love immediately. My wife adopted my Nintendo Switch Lite and we both got copies the night of release. Over on the Nintendo Dispatch podcast, we call it the perfect …

James Montemagno

Animate Anything with Xamarin.Forms

I have been building apps with Xamarin.Forms for nearly 6 years now! I love how it has evolved over the years, added new controls, new features, and simplified everything with Shell. While I think I can build pretty decent apps in general, one thing that I have always struggled with is animations. The very first release of Xamarin.Forms had a built in animation system to fade, move, and scale any of the controls. …

James Montemagno

Hello Again, My Name is James

And...... we are back! Where have I been? Inside, in Seattle! It has been around 5 months since my last update on the site and a lot of things have changed since then. Here is an update. Be safe when you get your coffee Since my last blog here are just a few things that have happened:

James Montemagno

Setting Android Status Bar Background & Icon Colors

Over the past few months, I have been attempting to figure out the best ways to implement a light theme and dark theme in my Hanselman.Forms app. Working closely with my friend Kym Phillpotts we came up with a very nice theme changer for Xamarin.Forms, that allowed us to change all of the colors dynamically. The result is a very nice looking application that allows the users to pick their theme or use system …

James Montemagno

Investing Time in the Xamarin Linker for Smaller App Sizes

When developing an app, 99% of our time goes into writing the code, testing the functionality, and making small UI tweaks to please our end users. Most of this is done in debug mode which optimizes compilation and app size for speed, which makes sense. When we flip that flag to Release with the default settings, we often pay very little attention as to what is happening to our app. We get a nice APK or IPA and ship …

James Montemagno

Windows Mouse Pointer & Cursor Features for Presenting

When I present, I am constantly zooming in and out to help attendees focus in on what I am talking about. It is also nice because it makes all the text nice and large so it is easier to see from the back of the room or if someone has reduced vision. One thing that has always bothered me, is that the mouse pointer is always tiny and the typing cursor is so thin. Well, not anymore with the latest versions of Windows …

James Montemagno

Azure DevOps Settings for Xamarin iOS 13 and Android 10 Apps

Settings up continuous integration can be tricky when there are new versions coming out. Recently Visual Studio 2019 updated to support Xcode 11, iOS 13, Android 10, .NET Core 3, and C# 8. What a whirlwind of new updates that CI servers got all around the same time! This means that as you were updating your apps your hosted machines also got updated and probably broke your builds :(. My good friend Jonathan Peppers …

James Montemagno
James Montemagno
Author

James Montemagno

Live, Love, Bike, and Code

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