Recently I updated my blog reader app to support the dark mode newer iOS and Android version support. While everything went smooth on iOS and the update is already live in the App Store, I had some more work to do on Android. One of the bigger problems: the WebView
I use to view posts does not automatically switch to dark mode with Xamarin.Forms
.
On part of the problem is that the WebView
does not support the CSS query " prefers-color-scheme
". This works as intended on iOS however and is a problem specific to Android. You can refer to this…
Whenever we load images from the web, there is a chance that the loading fails. For a better user experience, having a placeholder mechanism ready is essential. In this post, I will show you how I extended my fork of Xamarin.Forms.Nuke to achieve this goal on iOS.
Xamarin.Forms.Nuke is a Xamarin.Forms implementation of Nuke, one of the most advanced image libraries on iOS today. The Xamarin.Forms implementation focuses heavily on caching only, while the original library has a bunch of more features. …
The glidex.forms
library is a Xamarin.Forms
implementation of Glide, which is one of the quasi standards for imaging on Android (it is even recommended by Google). Luckily, Jonathan Peppers from Microsoft has a passion to improve Xamarin.Android
, and Xamarin.Forms
takes a big advantage from that as well. He made the Xamarin.Android
Binding library as well as the Xamarin.Forms
implementation. Like before with Xamarin.Forms.Nuke, I learned about that library because I am substituting my former image caching solution with Akavache.
If you want to load a placeholder that is stored in the resources of your Android project — there is no…
In this second post of my series about sending push notifications from WordPress to Xamarin apps via Azure, we’ll have a look at the Azure Function that handles our newly created Webhook.
First, let’s have a look at the lineup of this series once again:
The most simple approach to create a new Azure Function (if you already have an Azure account) is adding a new project to your…
It is no secret that push notifications help to keep your users engaged. There are a bunch of options out there if you have a WordPress blog. This is the first post of a new series that shows you to send them from a self-hosted WordPress installation to your Xamarin mobile app via Azure.
Choosing the “right” solution for sending push notifications isn’t easy if you have a WordPress blog. There are quite a bunch of options to choose from, and the right one for you might differ from my decision. I am using the most generic solution — a…
In this second post of my #XfEffects series, I am going to show you how to make the text of a Label grow and shrink within a defined range, based on the Xamarin.Forms.NamedSize enumeration.
When working with text, we often have to deal with some or all of the following:
As the amount of places where I need to automatically scale the FontSize is steadily increasing within my apps, I had to come up with a solution — the AutoFitFontSizeEffect.
Of course…
We finally arrived in 2020 — time to kick off my blogging year as well. With this post, I will show you some of the Visual Studio Extensions I am using frequently and that are making my life as a developer a bit easier.
Download Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TeamXavalon.XAMLStyler
Project Site: https://github.com/Xavalon/XamlStyler
In Visual Studio 2019, writing XAML normally ends up in very long lines because it does not automatically break into new lines. In May 2019, I discovered the Xaml Styler extension by watching a video on Channel9.
Xaml Styler, even in its default configuration (which I did never change, tbh)…
I finally finished porting my first app ever from Windows Phone to Android and iOS — “Fishing Knots +” is now published in the Google Play Store and Apple Appstore. This post summarizes what I’ve learned during the process of porting.
The app is about fishing knots. It sounds boring for most people, but for me, this app made me becoming a developer. I have a somewhat emotional connection to it. It was back in the time when Windows Phone 7 was new and hot. It was a new shiny OS from Microsoft, but it clearly lacked the loads of…
Every now and then, we need to customize our Xamarin.Forms apps to match a theme or other requirements. The Forms API has already a lot of options, but sometimes they aren’t enough. A common practice is to write custom renderers, but with the Effects API, there is another cool kid in town.
The documentation recommends using Effects when we just want to change properties on the underlying native control. I have begun to love Effects as they make my code more readable. With Effects, I always know that there is a platform-specific implementation attached, while that is not obvious when…
You may have noticed that we were silent since UniShare died last year in terms of communications. Nonetheless, we were busy building things behind the scenes. We also took the time to make some strategic decisions about our social media and web presences.
The first decision was about our presences on Facebook. With all the data scandals that came to light in the last months, we decided to close our Facebook page by the end of 2019. We believe that what went public is just the top of the iceberg, and we do no longer support Facebook in collecting data…