{"id":43686,"date":"2019-04-03T15:03:49","date_gmt":"2019-04-03T19:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.xamarin.com\/?p=39453"},"modified":"2019-08-30T08:32:38","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T15:32:38","slug":"visual-challenge-conquered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/visual-challenge-conquered\/","title":{"rendered":"Visual Challenge Conquered!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tLast week we issued a challenge<\/a> to the Xamarin community to use the new Material Design controls<\/a> with Visual<\/a> by reproducing an existing screen. The view should look and behave mostly the same on both Android and iOS. The goal for us was to learn if the new Visual feature was easy to use, how helpful the Material Design controls were for meeting design needs, and what we should do next to make this capability really sing. You really took to the challenge and exceeded our expectations!<\/p>\n

Biggest Surprise<\/h2>\n

You! While we have representation in the challenge from the \u201cusual suspects\u201d, we\u2019ve met many new people through this. All told we ended up with 99 forks, 51 pull requests from 40 people including Microsoft team members. Fantastic! Even though we\u2019ve been seeing new contributors on GitHub, I think many of you were just looking for the right opportunity to pitch in, and what better way than by doing what you do best: making beautiful cross-platform mobile apps quickly!<\/p>\n

Now Steven Thewissen<\/a> will not be the only one who can build beautiful complex UI’s with Xamarin. – Anonymous<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The challenge was time-boxed at an hour, but we know many of you went beyond. It\u2019s hard to stop when you\u2019re having so much success (and there\u2019s swag on the line)!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Thank you for stepping up and out of the shadows to participate in making Xamarin better.<\/p>\n

Shipping Early, Learning Quickly, Delivering Delight<\/h2>\n

We have many hypotheses about what you do when building applications, and how we can best improve Xamarin and the Visual Studio tools to delight you. And often we discover by speaking with you that we are wrong. Shocker! Perhaps you\u2019ll agree it\u2019s better to learn before building something off the mark.<\/p>\n

What we’ve been hearing from you (and observing in design trends) is that it’s increasingly important to be able to achieve a consistent design across Android and iOS. And it appeared that Material Design was the best starting point to help a majority of you reach that goal. We value shipping early and getting your feedback so we can quickly iterate in the best direction, and thus Visual with Material Components was shipping alongside Xamarin.Forms 3.6. Each control is not perfect, and now we have a lot more clarity on where to go next in our mission to be wrong less and deliver the help most beneficial to you quickly.<\/p>\n

\n

“As a newcomer to Xamarin (roughly 1 month and a half) from a mobile background mostly based on developing Android applications, I must say it impressed me and keeps impressing me the current state of the platform and what we are able to do with it. Pretty simple to use, took a newbie like me 15 minutes to build a beautiful UI.” – Diogo<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You Go Big<\/h2>\n

Just look at the calibre of apps you chose to reproduce. Nothing seems beyond your reach and you\u2019re showing us that Xamarin.Forms is making these results easier and easier for you to achieve in a very short amount of time. Some examples, (in no particular order):<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
    \n
  • Outlook<\/li>\n
  • Trello<\/li>\n
  • Slack<\/li>\n
  • Expedia Flights<\/li>\n
  • WhatsApp<\/li>\n
  • Twitter<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n
\n
    \n
  • Pocket Casts<\/li>\n
  • Medium<\/li>\n
  • Airbnb<\/li>\n
  • Microsoft News<\/li>\n
  • Mixer<\/li>\n
  • Gmail<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n
\n