Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
85 posts
During my Effective Navigation in Android talk at last years Xamarin Evolve I had the opportunity of showcasing my Xamarin.Android Templates Pack for Visual Studio, which you can get from the Visual Studio Gallery under “Tools->Extensions and Updates”. I like the templates that come installed with Xamarin, however the flexibility of Visual Studio to easily create project and item templates led me to creating this …
James Montemagno
I love coffee. You will normally find me riding my bike around Seattle stopping from coffee shop to coffee shop indulging in a 8oz quad lattes, strong black coffee, or probably a shot in the dark. So when I set out to blog about the new Google Maps Lite API it was pretty obvious what I needed to do… create an app showing me the closest coffee shops around me. In that moment Coffee Filter was born! What was …
James Montemagno
On my recent visit out to Tonto National Forest to visit one of my best friends, Luke Karrys, I started to realize the importance of trying to keep your app size down when shipping Android apps to Google Play. Working from the middle of the forest is relaxing, productive, and just plain fun, but there is one huge issue, internet and cell reception barely exists in the the middle of no where.
James Montemagno
I was overly excited when I got news that our amazing component team had finished the latest binding for AppCompat v7 rev 21! This was exciting to me because this meant that any developer could now introduce material design to their Android app and target older devices all the way back to API 7 (although you should just target API 15). I got busy migrating Bike Now over to AppCompat since it used the navigation …
James Montemagno
I fell in love with material design the moment I saw it and at Evolve 2014 my good friend and co-worker Jérémie Laval and I actually gave 2 sessions on the concept and implementation of material design in your apps. With the introduction of v7 app compat library rev 21 you are now able to upgrade your apps while maintain compatibility with older versions of Android. If you are looking to get started integrating the …
James Montemagno
You may have noticed that I am on a big Plugins for Xamarin kick currently. I have always had my Settings Plugin that I have updated over time, but then I blogged about creating plugins for Xamarin.Forms, released a Vibrate Plugin, and then discussed exactly what a Plugin for Xamarin is. I love plugins as they can abstract away features common on platforms into a simple API so you never have to write the same code …
James Montemagno
Update Xamarin.Forms now includes Pull To Refesh out of the box. Please read my article on it. It is true that I absolutely love cross platform settings for mobile applications built with Xamarin. However, there is something that I love even more… Pull To Refresh! It all started over year ago when I blogged about how to add a UIRefreshControl to MVVMCross iOS apps. Google then introduced an official …
James Montemagno
If you follow me at all on GitHub or Twitter than you probably know that I love portable class libraries. I know this might sound odd, but I also love settings inside of mobile applications. NSUserDefault, SharedPreferences, IsolatedStorage… yup I love it. A few years back when I was doing a lot of MVVMCross development I created Mvx.Plugins.Settings to enable developers to save settings and preferences extremely …
James Montemagno
