It’s been a few months since I did a NuGet release but lots has been going on in the code in the mean time. The focus this year has been less about harmonising Windows APIs across versions (although that’s still there of course), but widening the functionality to the Xamarin platforms. The result is that the vast majority of the APIs are now available across Android, iOS, Windows (UWP and 8.1) and Windows Phone (8.0, 8.1 Silverlight and 8.1 WinRT). In many cases I’ve added “light-up” support allowing Windows 10 functionality to be called from Windows (and Phone) 8.1 projects. This means you can write for maximum compatibility but take advantage of new features where available. The two packages are:-
https://www.nuget.org/packages/InTheHand.Core/
and
https://www.nuget.org/packages/InTheHand.UI/
As the name suggests the UI library separates out stuff which uses UI and so you can just use the former in a background task without worrying about dragging in UI dependencies.
The APIs are all modelled on UWP, the only difference being the root namespace is InTheHand rather than Windows and async methods return Task<T> rather than IAsyncOperation<T>.
The Core library features many namespaces around ApplicationModel – Interrogate app package metadata, make calls, send SMS and Emails, interact with Clipboard and Sharing. Beyond this are classes which take away the need to know which APIs to call on which platform – interrogate display properties, check network connectivity, read and write files and settings. This version extends the support for settings by supporting roaming settings on iOS just like Windows does – except these settings are roamed across the iCloud infrastructure rather than OneDrive. It’s important to add here that these settings only roam for devices on that specific platform type – Windows and iOS roaming data exist in separate worlds so data roamed from your iPhone Xamarin app won’t roam to your Windows laptop.
AnalyticsInfo is available and can report the OS version on iOS/Android and Windows 10. This is supported in the 8.1 libraries if running on the newer OS version. DisplayRequest allows your app to ask the device to keep the screen on – for example for a reader or video player. PowerManager gives you battery information.
Over in the InTheHand.UI library there are Badge and Toast notification APIs (Badge is not supported on Android). BadgeNotificationCreator and ToastNotificationCreator helper classes make it easy to create these notifications without having to deal with XML templates on Windows. A MessageDialog and a StatusBar which allows you to toggle a standard busy animation. On Windows there is also a unified SettingsPane API which uses the best available appearance depending on platform.
Going forwards I’m looking at removing the Windows Phone 8.0 (and possibly 8.1 Silverlight) target to simplify things and would be interested in any feedback on that. As always all the code is on GitHub:-
In The Hand Ltd 