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.

First Xamarin.Forms app goes live in both App Stores

A while ago I eluded to the fact that I was revisiting Xamarin.Forms for cross platform mobile development – previous projects had used the ‘native’ Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.IOS toolkit.

I was interested to see how far Xamarin.Forms had come since my last encounter where I found it lacking in some critical functionality that was required for the project at hand – primarily when dealing with Maps.

When I was approached by a user of my FillLPG application to write something along a very similar line, i.e. a number of points of interest displayed on a map with clickable markers to display more details, for both Android and iOS I wondered whether Xamarin.Forms had matured enough to do the job.

Online Tool of the Month – webhook.site

If you’ve ever worked with a third party API that uses Webhooks you will appreciate the power and flexibility that they provide. Instead of having to poll for updates yourself you can rely on the API to call you instead.

I first came across webhooks when developing a web application that implemented Stripe as it’s payment gateway for monthly/annual subscription payments.

In this instance the webhooks would fire when specific events occurred; e.g.

• Payment was successful
• Payment failed (and will be retried)
• Subscription Cancelled (manually or after repeated, automated attempts for payment have failed)

Long polling for this information would be a nightmare and having the webhook contact an endpoint on your API removes this headache – but does introduce another.