I’ve recently converted to a Mac. As a long time Windows user, one thing I was very accustomed to was keeping multiple visual studio, or more recently, Xamarin Studio instances open at any given time. Switching to a Mac I found this isn’t so easy, so I decided to make a nice little Launcher application to open new Xamarin Studio instances at will!
So, without further ado, please download the Xamarin Studio Launcher!
Had a great turnout and lots of solid questions at my talk on Xamarin and C# at Detroit MobiDevDay 2013. I’ve got my slides posted for anyone who cares to have a look!
Thanks to @MobiDevDay for having me, and to all those who came out!
Xamarin Evolve 2013 was an Awesome conference! I got to see a lot of familiar faces, and meet plenty of new ones! It’s such a great experience to see and talk with such great people who I’d only otherwise know online!
I also had the great privilege to do some speaking at Evolve! I’ve posted my slides below and will update the post with links to the videos when they are available!
Thanks to Xamarin and everyone who made this such a great event!
Just before the new year, I wrote a post about switching back to Android (to a Nexus 4), and I was excited at the prospect. I explained that I’d been a long time iOS user (quite happily so), except for a brief stint on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) which ended not so well.
Well, it’s been about a month now since I’ve switched back to Android, and I’m not looking back anytime soon! I’m going to do a quick recap about the things I love, and the things I miss:
Way back in Froyo days, I took the leap from my iPhone 3G to Android as my daily device with a Samsung Galaxy S. I was co-authoring a book Professional Android Development with Mono and C#/.NET
Android was new, it was exciting, it was different. It was also slower, higher maintenance, and had me flashing roms weekly. Not necessarily a problem for a supergeek like me, but still tiresome and prone to moments of Oh sorry, that’s a bug in my phone’s rom or my battery’s dead because of all the services i have running.
Needless to say, it wasn’t very long before I was back on the iPhone train. I was content with the iPhone 4, and then the iPhone 4S, and now the iPhone 5. They’re all great devices, they just work… as long as you want to use them how Apple intends.
The primary reasn I’m switching back to Android, is my Galaxy S just doesn’t cut it for development anymore. My wonderful wife will inherit my iPhone 5 (like she does all my devices), and I’ll have a Nexus 4 to test on soon.
So the new iPhone 5 has arrived, as well as the Gold Master iOS6 SDK! Hurray!
Push Notifications have intrigued me since Apple first introduced them in iOS years ago. RIM had been doing this for a while, but as a platform it never excited me. As soon as the documentation for their APNs protocol was released I started busily implementing a solution to send push notifications in C#. The first version of the protocol was already terrible, but I’m not going to harp on that as we’ve got a newer version that’s only slightly better to tear apart.
I’m the author of PushSharp (https://github.com/Redth/PushSharp) which is a .NET library to assist developers in delivering push notifications on as many platforms as possible (iOS, Android, Windows, Windows Phone, and HTML5). This library was the culmination of my previous efforts in individual libraries (APNS-Sharp and C2DM-Sharp mostly), and represents a more abstracted, standardized, easier way to support push notifications on all the platforms you may target as a developer.
This post is a chance for me to vent, to explore my frustrations with Apple’s APNS protocol, and hope that they somehow listen and change it. You’ll notice how there’s no complaining about the way the other platforms implement their protocols. This is because they aren’t terrible (though they aren’t perfect either).
First and foremost: Xamarin has been doing an awesome job with their MonoTouch and Mono for Android product line! Huge kudos to the entire team for allowing us some much needed obj-c and java mobile platform escapism!
If you don’t know about Xamarin, they are the company behind products allowing developers to write TRUELY NATIVE applications for Android and iOS in C#! I honestly can’t say enough good things about these products, but you should check them out for yourself: http://xamarin.com
Onto the goodies. If it wasn’t enough for us to be able to access native iOS and Android API’s via C#, Xamarin has gone ahead and started building a cross mobile platform set of libraries which aim to help us developers even more in creating sets of code to be reused on all the great mobile platforms. You can check out more about this initiative here: http://blog.xamarin.com/2011/11/22/introducing-the-xamarin-mobile-api/
So if you haven’t heard yet, Facebook has come out with their own BBM slash iMessage slash Kik slash WhatsApp slash slash slash… Oh great, another messenger app that we don’t need? I live in a world where I’m geeked out for every new gadget and service on the planet. I sign up first, I play around with the service, and I daydream about how wonderful my life would be if all my friends got onboard and started using this newfangled, awesome, life altering service! Unfortunately, that’s all just a daydream.
I don’t know about you, but the main thing I’m interested in on any new mobile development platform for some reason, is LISTS. I think I’m so fixated on lists is because of the way the iPhone so successfully introduced the paradigm of list based navigation. Everything can be done in a series of lists (ok not really, but they are crucial to many apps!).
Naturally then, the first thing I sought out to do on MonoDroid was to create a list. Easy, piece of cake… If you want to create a boring old list with a single line of text for each item. This is no doubt, an important part of every developer’s Hello World development phase, but it doesn’t take long before you’re craving images, several text elements, and possibly even some checkboxes and/or buttons (easy there tiger). For every ListView in Android, there is a prince charming Listview Adapter to save the day.
