Jérémie Laval

ActivityTask: A Helper for Async/Await on Android

September 25th, 2017

At Google I/O, several members of the Xamarin team attended the Architecture Component talk on Android lifecycle (which I recommend you watch). While the solutions presented there are interesting and, in some cases, map to patterns we already have in .NET, it resonated with those of us present because of how those Android lifecycle ...

A Scalable Introduction to Vector Drawables

May 12th, 2015

Among the many novelties brought to Android in 5.0 Lollipop, vector drawables are one of my favorite additions. They manage to both solve one of the oldest Android pain points (wide range of screen densities) and also pave the way for much better interactions in our apps. Introduction to Vector Drawables What exactly are vector ...

Tips for your First Wear App

August 27th, 2014

Android Wear was officially released at Google I/O 2014, giving developers a unique opportunity to create Android apps for a new class of devices. With our recently announced preliminary support in Xamarin.Android you are not only able to extend your current application with enhanced notifications, but also develop an app that runs ...

Pack Xamarin in your Cardboard

August 13th, 2014

Virtual Reality is a hot topic these days and is viewed by many as the platform of tomorrow in some fields, like game development. At this year's Google I/O conference, among the flurry of product announcements, Google presented an interesting project called Cardboard. The experiment sprouts from a desire to make virtual reality, as ...

Swipe To Refresh added to Android

April 9th, 2014

Google recently released an update to the Android support library bringing in an exciting new standard implementation of a pattern that they have been progressively introducing through applications such as GMail or Google Now. This pattern, called swipe-to-refresh, uses an upward pull user feedback to inform the app that a data refresh...

Data Extraction in Mobile Apps

September 5th, 2013

Many of the mobile apps we build and use provide an optimized interface on top of raw data retrieved from a remote service. When the service is constructed with a mobile app in mind, it’s generally mindful of giving you a nice API that takes into account the limitations of the device you are running on, which could include intermittent...

AutoLayout with Xamarin.Mac

August 2nd, 2013

As part of our (almost) weekly preview releases of the iOS designer, we recently revamped our property panel using native Cocoa widgets. This proved to be an interesting challenge on the layout side of things since, historically, Cocoa didn’t offer any layout primitives like Gtk+ or WPF. And the property panel, being fairly dynamic in ...

Android: The Swipe-Down-to-Refresh Pattern

June 17th, 2013

The pull-to-refresh pattern, popularized by applications like Twitter and finally integrated as a native component in iOS 6, has long been frowned upon in Android land. Because the feature is generally considered an iOS pattern, apps utilizing it on Android are sometimes regarded as "bad ports" of their iPhone counterparts. Instead of ...

Exploring Android Property Animations

June 3rd, 2013

In the Xaminar about Android animations that we published earlier this year, we discussed how recent versions of Google's mobile platform introduce lots of powerful features for animating user interfaces. In that talk, I mentioned the property animation API, which lets you animate any object property—including non-graphical ...

Android Tricks: Vignette Image Effect

February 28th, 2013

The code in this blog post is based on code from Romain Guy's blog. Today, we are going to discuss a really nice effect that you can apply to your ImageView to automatically add rounded corners and extra shadowing to the displayed Bitmap: These effects are based on a couple of Shader classes like BitmapShader, RadialGradient and ...