Mobile

Xamarin

Introducing SwipeCardView 2.0

Posted on by markolazic88

A year and a half ago I introduced SwipeCardView 1.0, a lightweight MVVM friendly user control that brings Tinder-style swipe card view into Xamarin.Forms applications. Since then, more than 1000 people downloaded the NuGet package, while the related blog post is no. 1 result on Google for “tinder xamarin”. This proves that people really need this kind of plugin, so I decided to introduce the version 2.0, with a lot of improvements and new features. About This netstandard2.0 library is intended for anyone who wants to build swipeable UI in C#. As it’s built on top of Xamarin.Forms, it works […]

Xamarin

Prevent Xamarin Forms SignaturePad Memory Leak on Android

Posted on by markolazic88

Last year at a local conference I gave a talk on topic “Xamarin Forms Application Performance Through Memory Management”. One of the examples I presented was occurrence of memory leak when using Acr SignaturePad control, which caused Out of Memory exception on Android after 10-15 signings. In the meantime the control became obsolete as Xamarin introduced the new version of their SignaturePad control which now supports Xamarin.Forms. Unfortunately memory leak is still an open issue on GitHub that bothers many developers. The issue is deeply rooted in the way how Xamarin framework handles memory management. I highly recommend you to […]

Xamarin

Time zone conversion in Xamarin Forms XAML using NodaTime

Posted on by markolazic88

When developing mobile applications for multiple platforms it can be important to understand how to implement time zones conversion in elegant manner. Xamarin Forms is a cross-platform natively backed UI toolkit abstraction that allows us to easily create user interfaces that can be shared across Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. It’s implementation of XAML allows us to define user interfaces using markup rather than code, and it is well suited for use with the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) application architecture. First thought on time zone conversions would be to use .NET native TimeZoneInfo class. Since key component of building cross-platform applications is […]

Xamarin

Create Tinder-like UI in Xamarin Forms using SwipeCardView

Posted on by markolazic88

SwipeCardView is a lightweight MVVM friendly user control that brings Tinder-style swipe card view into Xamarin.Forms applications. In this blog post I will talk about card based user interfaces and why they are better than newsfeeds, with the special attention to Tinder approach. Then I will cover in detail the design and the implementation of SwipeCardView. If you are not interested in the background nor implementation details, feel free to jump to the usage example of this PCL library, which is available on NuGet and GitHub.

Mobile Xamarin

Remotely controlled nightly memory cleanup on Android devices

Posted on by markolazic88

Imagine you have an enterprise application running on hundreds or thousands of mobile devices in field. Your application is being used every day, and it is rarely being restarted (users prefer leaving the application in the foreground all the time). While we all tend to create applications that are memory responsible, the reality is that there would be memory leaks. With intensive usage of the application described in the example above, even small memory leaks would eventually cause the issues (application malfunctions or breaks). Our Android application is developed using Xamarin.Forms. Our server runs on Azure and exposes REST API […]