Another Xamarin Forms app about to hit the App/Play Stores

Smite is a wooden garden game based on a Northern European game and played around the world.

If you think of a combination of skittles and boules you’ll be pretty much there – but not quite, there are a few twists.

Each player will take turns to throw a wooden ‘smitter’ at 10 numbered wooden pins, arranged in a similar manner to those in 10 pin bowling.

• Knock over a single pin and you score the number on that pin.
• Knock over two or more pins and you score the number of pins that fall; knock over four pins and you score four points.
• Before the next players turn the pins are stood back up but remain where they fell, they are not returned to their original location.
• Miss all the pins three turns in a row and you are ‘smitten’ and out of the game.
• If any players score exceeds 50 points they are returned to 25..!
• When a player scores exactly 50 points the game will end when the round completes – all remaining players will complete the round. There can be more than one winner!

It sounds simple but when the pins start to spread out the game becomes much harder – I can personally attest to this, as can many members of my family..!

Online Tool of the Month – ExtensionMethod.Net

OK – not really a tool, more of a resource but I hope you will like it.

As you may know my language of choice is C# and since version 3.0 developers have been able to add functionality to existing types without actually modifying the type itself by using Extension Methods.

We are all used to the String methods such as ToUpper() and ToLower() – but what if you wanted to truncate a string to a specified length and apply a ‘…’ suffix?

Online Tool of the Month – MakeAppIcon

I’ve been developing a couple of Xamarin applications recently and while the default application icons are better than nothing you will of course need to replace these with custom graphics before going live.

Now I’m no designer so I’ve used Fiverr to find suitable resources for a number of previous projects (websites, logos and menu icons) and have done so for these mobile apps. In return for about £10 I received nice, clean icon designs which I’d never have been able to put together myself – £10 well spent in my opinion as I can spend the time coding instead 🙂

Xamarin Gotcha – Care needed when taking a photo with the Xam.Plugin.Media plugin

I’m currently writing a Xamarin.Forms scoreboard application which, as part of the functionality, allowed each player to take a photo which would be displayed within their ‘player tile’. I made use of the Xam.Plugin.Media plugin developed by James Montemagno to implement this feature and everything was working like a charm. I then parked the project for a couple of months while I attended to some paying development and training.

When I returned to the project I looked at the outstanding items on my backlog and decided to implement the saving of game state when the app is backgrounded. This was pretty straightforward and I had it nailed in a few hours by adding code to the OnStart, OnSleep and OnResume handlers in the shared class library (in this case, a PCL). After testing the functionality I then ran through a manual ‘smoke test’ to make sure everything was working as expected – and that’s when the trouble started 🙁

Online Tool of the Month – MockUPhone.com

While preparing my previous post I needed to generate some mobile device mockups showing my Xamarin.Forms app running in Android and iOS.

In the past I have normally cobbled these together using Paint.Net, a device bezel image and overlaying the screenshot onto it. Not pretty but it worked and looked fine.

However, the bezel images I had were rather old and I wanted to freshen things up a bit so went off in search of some new ones – only to come across MockUPhone.com.