our posts tagged “xamarin”

mobile development: finding the right solution
Sean Sparkman (@seansparkman) & Paul Zolnierczyk (@paulish29)
april 28th, 2020

With an estimated 3.2 billion smartphone users in 2019, the mobile app industry is growing and not showing any signs of slowing down. Along with this growth in smartphone usage comes increased demands and expectations from end users. Apps need to use the latest smartphone features, be fast & easy to use. This is further complicated with the need to develop for both Android and Apple smartphones as well as tablets. For someone with an app idea, considering all these factors can be a bit overwhelming. This is where Infinity Interactive steps in. Infinity has extensive experience in the mobile app arena and can help you identify the best approach for your app and target audience. Today, companies are not just restricted to developing a native mobile app. They can also build mobile web apps, progressive web apps, and cross-platform apps. This post will cover the pros and cons of each with the hope of giving a clear path for taking an app idea into app reality.

Even on mobile, sometimes you need to show people a PDF. In your Xamarin Android app, for most situations, having the user download the document to view it outside of the app using Android's native document viewer is probably fine. But what if the design specifies displaying the document in the app? And what if that document is 100+ pages long? We recently ran into this here at Infinity Interactive and needless to say, displaying a PDF in your Xamarin Android app is not as straightforward as one might expect.

Uno Platform
Kenzie Whalen (@knz_whalen)
october 25th, 2019

In the beginning, there were iOS, Android, and the Web. Entirely separate platforms that had to be developed as such.

Then, along came Xamarin. Developers could write iOS and Android apps using a single codebase, but we were still on our own for Web development.

Now, Uno has emerged. Building on top of Xamarin, it gives us the power to write iOS, Android, Web, and even UWP applications using shared logic and UI!

Infinity loves Perl and we're happy to announce our involvement in The Perl Conference 2017. Infinity is proud to be a sponsor for the conference, and pleased to provide the Perl in a Day workshop by John "genehack" Anderson. Additionally, John is presenting his "A Modest Introduction to Swift" talk, and Jay Hannah is giving a talk on "Civic Hacking: TIF is millions of YOUR tax dollars". And one more thing… we're giving you a conference app on iOS and Android, to make it easier to browse the schedule on your mobile device!

We do a lot of work with apps and Xamarin here at Infinity. We’ve seen that adding animations to our Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android app makes for a more appealing user experience. But if those animations are overly detailed, programming them may take quite a bit of time. Well, thanks to Lottie (an Open Source animation tool from Airbnb) and Lottie Xamarin (a set of Xamarin bindings for Lottie created by Martijn van Dijk), it's a lot easier to add animations into our apps. Let's check it out.

Infinity Interactive is proud to announce that we are officially a Xamarin Premier Consulting Partner!

Infinity's own Paul Zolnierczyk attended (and presented at) MKE DOT NET, a one-day development conference in the Milwaukee area. MKE DOT NET brings together .NET developers from the Midwest to explore new ideas, code, share knowledge and discover best practices. Here’s his recap.

YAPC::EU recently hosted their annual Perl Conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and Infinity Interactive is proud to have partnered with them in releasing the YAPC::EU mobile application on iOS and Android. Today, we’ll cover some of the technical challenges we faced in creating this app, which we built on the foundation of the Open Source project that provided a similar app for Xamarin Evolve 2016.

If you’re part of the Perl community, you probably know how much Infinity loves Perl and Open Source. However, you may not know how much we also love Xamarin and mobile development --- but after you check out the new YAPC::EU::2016 app on iOS or Android we've put together, we hope you’ll appreciate how our love for Open Source is too big to be limited to just one language or platform.

We're back with the second part of our post on iOS Animations in Xamarin. In this post I'm detailing some of the animations seen in TaxChat, an iOS App we recently launched. In the first part we discussed AnimateNotify, AnimateKeyframes and AddKeyframeWithRelativeStartTime. In this continuation we will look at animating rotation and scale using CGAffineTransform, then animating a CAGradientLayer using CABasicAnimation.

We recently launched the app TaxChat, "tax preparation for people who have better things to do." The iOS app saves you from having to do your taxes by yourself; instead you just answer a few questions, snap a couple of photos and a certified tax professional will take care of your tax return for you. All through a beautiful & intuitive interface. You can read more about it at tax.chat.

Since we built TaxChat using Xamarin, I figure this is a great time to write a post on iOS animations in Xamarin and detail some of the animations seen in the app. If you don't already know about Xamarin, check out this introduction to Xamarin by our resident Xamarin MVP, Sean Sparkman. Essentially, Xamarin allows you to build native apps for multiple platforms all in C#, which is pretty sweet.

HTML 5 has proven to not be the silver bullet everyone hoped for. By their own admission, Facebook's biggest mistake was betting on HTML 5. While it works well for content, anything more than that needs native performance. Mobile users demand native performance. The first few seconds of any mobile user's experience is the most important. Users will uninstall or never again open an app if they are dissatisfied in those crucial first moments. So what is the answer if it's not HTML 5? There's a case to be made that it's Xamarin.