April 22, 2015 / SharpMobileCode / 11 Comments
In today’s modern mobile apps it is very common for apps to require a user account in order to function. Apps like Twitter and Instagram require a user account in order to be used. So a very common User Experience is to show a Login Page when the app first starts up. The user should enter in their credentials, and then log into the app. If the user does not have any credentials, the app should offer them the ability to create an account, and then log them in.
Though this seems like a trivial task, it can be somewhat confusing if you are new to building iOS apps using Xamarin.iOS. In this article I’m going to show you an effective way to add a Login Page and a Signup Page to your Xamarin.iOS apps with a great user experience and a neat animation trick.
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April 13, 2015 / SharpMobileCode / 7 Comments
I learned something new last week that I felt I probably should have learned a long time ago. As I know from my previous experience in Android development, ListViews only scroll vertically. In the past, there was no out of the box support for horizontal ListViews in Android. Developers had to create them manually or use 3rd party libraries hosted on GitHub. If you examined a 3rd parties source code, you would see implementing a horizontal ListView is not an easy task. With the release of Android 4.4 KitKat (API Level 19), a new control was added to the Android SDK. This new control is called a RecyclerView, and is available via the Android Support Library v7.
Luckily for us Xamarin Developers, we have out of the box binding to this library, so we can use this just like native Java developers. In this post I’m going to show you how to implement a vertical ListView (just like a standard ListView), as well as a Horizontal ListView. But we are not going to use the old legacy ListView control or a 3rd party library. We are going to use the now out of the box RecyclerView to implement both. The good news is that the since this is available in the Android Support Library v7, this control can run on devices from the current version of Android, all the way down to API Level 7 (Android 2.1 Eclair). So this control remains backwards compatible with almost any device out there. So let’s get coding!
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