iOS 7 and Xamarin: Ready When You Are

Today’s iOS 7 release from Apple is almost as revolutionary as the original iPhone, and our engineers have been working around the clock to ensure that C# developers have the power to leverage everything the new OS has to offer on day one!

We’re happy to announce that Xamarin.iOS 7 is now officially released, and ready for you to build amazing apps for Apple’s new devices and operating system.  We have extensive resources to help you get started:

• An in-depth introduction to new iOS 7 APIs
• An overview of iOS 7 user interface changes
• Samples to get started
• Release notes with detailed information about Xamarin.iOS 7.0
• A one hour iOS 7 guided tour

Here are our favorite highlights from this release:

Native is Beautiful

With iOS 7, you now have an unprecedented amount of control over text and images in your apps. The newly added Text Kit framework lets you programmatically control text in applications without low-level Core Text coding. New Core Image filters such as CIColorClamp, CIColorCrossPolynomial and CIColorCubeWithColorSpace, let developers turn images into compelling experiences. See our Xamarin.iOS Core Image samples for complete coverage of every filter available in iOS 7.

Make your app pop with Animation and Physics

Apple’s UI framework now has a physics engine built in – UIKit Dynamics. Using a simple declarative API, your apps can now have immersive animations that feel realistic. Spring and keyframe animation support in UIView make it easy to take granular control of animations without having to write low-level Core Animation. You can also fully customize transitions between controllers, allowing visual interaction cues to be more immersive than ever before.

Leverage New Multi-tasking Capabilities

Use the powerful new multi-tasking features of iOS 7 to consume less battery power while doing work in the background. Update content while your users are away with background fetch, or use the background transfer service to upload and download large files, without a fixed time limit. With remote notifications, your apps can be invoked to display lock screen banners, or take other silent actions.

Harness the Network in New Ways

With Core Bluetooth, performing common tasks with Bluetooth has become easier than ever. Additionally, Apple’s iBeacons leverage Bluetooth Low Energy to give your applications location support that can work indoors, enabling scenarios based upon device proximity that were not previously possible. The new Multipeer Connectivity Framework provides a high-level API for apps to discover networked devices and services advertised over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other ad-hoc network technologies.

Take 2D Gaming to a New Dimension

iOS now ships with great game development APIs out of the box. Sprite Kit is Apple’s new 2D game framework that includes the popular Box 2D physics engine and integrates to Apple’s Core Graphics framework to let high performance 2D games shine on iOS. Gamers longing for dedicated gaming hardware with physical buttons and D-Pads can now get their fix with games that leverage Apple’s Game Controller framework.

Create Highly Contextual Apps using Core Motion

Xamarin.iOS enables you to build apps that interact with device sensors to capture accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer data. Additionally, the Core Motion framework surfaces such data from the new high fidelity, low power M7 Motion Co-Processor introduced in the iPhone 5s, giving apps a very granular view of the user’s motion context, including speed, orientation, and mode of travel (i.e., walking vs driving).

Current subscribers can fire up Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio to update to Xamarin.iOS 7 and grab Xcode 5 to get started right away. Customers without a current subscription can visit our store or download Xamarin to get started developing iOS 7 apps in C# today. Also view our recorded webinar on Top iOS 7 APIs.

View the Webinar