Improving iOS/Android Numeric Keyboards With KeyboardActions

Flutter: Using Keyboard Actions To Improve Mobile User Experience

Ryan LaRue Articles, Design, Development Technologies & Tools, Flutter, Mobile, UI/UX 1 Comment

This post covers three options for customizing an iOS or Android keyboard in a Flutter mobile application, with a code walkthrough of using the Keyboard Actions package to easily add keyboard features that increase user efficiency.

Mobile app developers, have you ever noticed that the native iOS numeric keyboard does not include certain features that might be helpful? For example, a Done button? Or how about arrow buttons to traverse form fields? To jog your memory, here’s what the native iOS numeric keyboard looks like…

Xamarin.Forms App Push Notifications with Azure Notification Hubs

Rukesh Shrestha .NET, Articles, Azure, Cloud, Mobile, Tutorial, Xamarin 2 Comments

Push notifications are a vital feature for today’s enterprise mobile applications. Why are they so important? They allow the business to communicate with its users without requiring the application to be in an open state.

Xamarin.Forms allows developers to create user interfaces in XAML with code behind it in C#, which then renders as native controls on iOS and Android platforms.

In this blog, we go through a step-by-step tutorial for setting up and configuring push notifications on Xamarin.Forms applications using Azure Notification Hubs. Let’s dive right in.

Getting Started with Xamarin Forms and Prism

Ryan Nguyen .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Mobile, Xamarin 2 Comments

In this blog, I’ll show you how easy it is to create an Android and iOS application using Xamarin Forms while utilizing Prism.

What are Xamarin Forms?
Xamarin Forms is a platform that allows developers to create native Android, iOS, and Windows applications while using the beloved C# programming language. 

An attractive feature of Xamarin Forms is that it uses a shared C# codebase to create a native user interface specific to their platform. Out of the box, Xamarin provides large collections of controls to get started. It also has the ability to access native platform features, such as camera access, GPS, text to speech, etc, by using the Dependency Service.

What is Prism?
According to the Prism website, Prism is defined as “a framework for building loosely coupled, maintainable, and testable XAML applications in WPF, Windows 10 UWP, and Xamarin Forms. Prism provides an implementation of a collection of design patterns that are helpful in writing well-structured and maintainable XAML applications, including MVVM, dependency injection, commands, EventAggregator, and others.” In other words, Prism helps users to write better code…. 

An Example Progressive Web App on Android

RJ Dela-Cruz Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Mobile 1 Comment

In my experience, the best way to learn a new technology is to create something tangible with it. I recently sought out to learn Angular and Angular Material. So, I developed an experimental Angular app that uses omdbapi to query Movie Posters. It’s aptly named Movie Poster Finder.

Developing the Movie Poster Finder application, I ran into a thing called PWA, which is also known as Progressive Web Applications. I thought it was really neat that both Android and mobile Chrome treat them as native applications.

In this post, I will show an example Progressive Web Application in action, explaining what I encountered when turning an experimental Angular web application into a PWA.