In The Hand LtdRecent versions of Xamarin include the Forms Previewer which generates a live representation of your XAML as it will appear on iOS or Android. I noticed one slight problem when working on my MediaElement control… The Android renderer instantiates a MediaController object. This is a standard Android class but the Forms Previewer would throw an exception […]
Xamarin Forms has quite a rich set of controls which work natively across platforms however a big gap in the functionality is the ability to play audio or video content. You can create custom controls for Xamarin and from the platform-specific renderers you have full access to the APIs provided by that platform to create […]
My free Clipboarder app for Windows Phone has now (finally) been re-written as a universal Windows 10 app. It’s currently available across all Windows 10 platforms (except Xbox but that seems fairly logical!). The app provides a share target allowing you to share data from modern apps to the clipboard to be pasted into any […]
Update 15th February 2017 Alexa can now be paired with an Outlook.com account which means you no longer have to use this workaround. We’ve used the “Family Room” feature from Windows Phone and although it’s been discontinued the shared Outlook.com calendar is still vital. We’ve got an Amazon Echo but when setting it up […]
I’ve just completed and passed the exam and am now a Xamarin-certified Mobile developer. Having been working with Xamarin since the days of Mono for Android and MonoTouch I should have probably have got around to doing this earlier. Now it’s done I can relax and concentrate on the important task of making a chocolate […]
The Surface Dial, and the RadialController API provide an interesting new input metaphor. You may have some ideas of how you could use it but don’t actually have the hardware. Since I tried creating an Etch-a-Sketch app using the dial I was thinking about how to implement a second dial. Most of us already have […]
What started as a Windows project (unifying the then separate Phone and PC APIs) has since expanded through the Xamarin platforms (iOS and Android) and beyond. The latest NuGet package adds Apple tvOS, macOS and the recently announced Tizen .NET Preview. The usual caveat applies that not all platforms support all functionality but there is […]
Microsoft have demonstrated how the Surface Dial can be used in conjunction with Pen input for drawing, but what about drawing with the Dial itself? For those of us with warm memories of the Etch-a-Sketch I thought it would be fun to replicate the experience with the Surface Dial. Now of course there is a […]
As with the Universal Windows Platform itself, Pontoon has a rich API which supports functionality which may not be available on all platforms. There are two reasons for this – either the platform doesn’t natively support the feature or I just haven’t got around to implementing it yet. There is a simple mechanism to test […]
I first created the “Charming” libraries for Windows Phone in order to add some APIs which were added to Windows 8 but not available on phone. Many of the early ones replicated the “Charms” related functionality (Sharing/Search/Settings) hence the silly name. When I created version 9 about a year ago I consolidated lots of separate libraries into […]
In The Hand Ltd 