One of the most important things when it comes to perceived performance is how fast a web page loads when it’s first accessed, and one of the key things in having a fast-loading web page is to only load what’s necessary, when necessary. Of course, this might sound like a lot of work, but there…
Need a webcam to use for streaming? Why not use one of the broken/outdated phones you currently have lying around the house? Most phones are capable of taking pictures and recording at a higher resolution and with a better quality than your typical webcam. This makes them an ideal replacement for a webcam when streaming,…
Lighthouse is an automated tool for auditing the performance, accessibility and overall user experience of any web page. It was initially meant to audit PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) but it’s much more than that. Easiest way to audit your website is using the latest version of Chrome. Navigate to your website and open up the…
I’ve started playing with animations in Xamarin Forms only recently and created a cool background animation for one of my apps (Charades for Dota 2) which I thought I would share. So without any extra introduction, this is the final result: The GIF is a bit jittery but that’s just because by PC can’t handle…
There’s a couple of new things coming with this new version of Xamarin Forms, and one of them is Cascading StyleSheets (CSS). Yup, that’s right, CSS in XAML. Not sure yet how useful it will be and how adopted it will become – as quite a few features are still missing but I’m guessing it…
So far we’ve been displaying ads only on Android and iOS through AdMob and our AdMob renderer. Google dropped support for Windows Phone altogether and never bothered with UWP so AdMob is not a choice in this particular situation. Fortunately, Microsoft is also in the advertising business and they’ve now nicely integrated everything in the…
Upgrading between major versions of Xamarin tends to break stuff and lead to projects no longer building due to weird errors. In their innocence, most devs will take these errors for real, try to understand them, to fix them and when they fail, they will Google them; when most of the times, the fix is…
Right, so you are one of those guys targeting UWP with their Xamarin Forms app… aand you want to use the new Acrylic brush to make you application stand out. Say no more. We won’t be using any 3rd party library/package to do this and we’ll be working in the platform specific project; so open…
In one of my previous posts on How To: Add AdMob to your Xamarin Forms app I was giving a piece of code that looked like this: That will work perfectly with Banner ads but it’s going to fail if you choose to use a Smart Banner. For a Smart Banner, the sizing is a…
While Xamarin keeps adding features and improves the performance of Xamarin Forms with each and every update, what they offer in terms of cross-platform user controls is not always enough. In my case, I’ve got an RSS reader app which aggregates news articles from different sources and displays them in a ListView like this: While…
One of the first things people think about when developing for a new platform / using a new technology is monetization; and in my case the question is: how easy is it to integrate AdMob? For Xamarin Forms the answer would be: “It depends” – it depends on luck & on the complexity of what…
Just run Xamarin Studio as an Administrator. The error usually means that the process cannot access a certain resource. In my case that meant insufficient rights; but it could also mean that some file is already in use; in that case – Clean the solution & Rebuild and if that doesn’t work either do a…