Not really, no. Unless the business drives that need for change. This is a mistake that many (including myself) will do. A new piece of technology comes out, our software needs to be rewritten using it. But what advantage does that bring to our business and to our end-users? In most cases, none. Instead of…
Your app’s startup time matters because it’s the first impression that the user gets to make about it’s performance. It doesn’t matter what you promise me if it takes 10 seconds to load the app each time I try and use it. I might even uninstall it thinking it doesn’t actually work. And with Xamarin…
Until recently NativeAds were in a closed beta and only certain developers had access to the ad format, but now, it’s available to everyone. Here’s how you can go about adding one to you Android Xamarin Forms app using a custom renderer. Step 1: Create a view to act as a placeholder for the ad…
Properly sizing your images can improve your page loading times drastically. Here we’re looking at two distinct categories: In our case we have three images on the front page not optimized or improperly sized. For optimizing them I will use Squoosh. First image – the Outworld Apps logo: it had 887px in width and was…
While developing Xamarin Forms applications you will often find yourself in a situation where you need to set different values for a certain property depending on the operating system. OnPlatform allows you to do just that and can be used both from C# code and XAML. Let’s look at a few examples. For this article,…
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 Why not use one of the broken/outdated phones you currently have lying around the house?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…