Issue 289  12th December 2020

Hey everyone,

Happy Weekend!

Another high quality as always issue this week! Hopefully you are all looking forward to relaxing at the end of the year. Thanks as ever to all our contributors this week from blogs to podcasts to videos. It's always great to see such variety of content!

Have a great weekend whatever you have planned.

Luce 🧡

Microsoft Updates Azure Mobile Apps, Ponders Future

Microsoft recently released a new version of Azure Mobile Apps, which allows developers, including those on Xamarin, to have cloud-based back-ends for data storage, online/offline synch, authentication and more. It also now supports Xamarin.Essentials for authentication, winner!

The team have released a survey to help direct and potentially save the future of this service so its well worth taking a few minutes if you use it with your apps!

Microsoft Updates Azure Mobile Apps, Ponders Future

10 Places To Search for Design Inspiration

We love pretty UI's in our mobile apps and so finding design inspiration can really help us in making beautiful apps. This list of 10 places you can find some is really useful and includes some classics like Behance and Dribble.

10 Places To Search for Design Inspiration by Inês Bernardino

Animate A Mic Drop With Xamarin.Forms

Sometimes we watch amazing talks or read amazing blogs and just think to ourselves 'oooo mic drop!'..so isn't is great to be able to add a super sweet animation into your app that shows just that?!

Animate A Mic Drop With Xamarin.Forms by Khalid Abuhakmeh

Replicating Bill Details UI in Xamarin Forms

Another great entry in the recreating Dribble UI trend, from Leomaris Reyes. This week, it's a Bill Details UI. This kind of UI is common for many scenarios so its great to learn how to make it look great too!

Replicating Bill Details UI in Xamarin Forms by Leomaris Reyes

Meet the RadPopUp Control for Xamarin Forms

Sometimes we have to present certain important information on our application in order to be able to alert the user in a fast, precise, concise way of demanding all their attention, with a goal of a quick reaction and effective understanding of the information.

This information can be presented if the user performs a specific action. Let’s look at an sample scenario!

Meet the RadPopUp Control for Xamarin Forms by Leomaris Reyes

Xamarin.Forms.DynamicSize – Xamarin Blog by officialdoniald

A really exciting package that takes care of resizing your UI depending on the device. So if you are using specific sizes for your components such as pixels, it will dynamically adapt without you having to worry. Wonderful!

Xamarin.Forms.DynamicSize – Xamarin Blog by officialdoniald by Bence960206

5 Must Install NuGets for New Xamarin Projects

Not 1 but 5!! Xamarin comes with some amazing features out of the box in it's own NuGet packages, but also with the included Xamarin.Essentials package for Forms projects, allowing you to access loads of native features from your shared code. But there are some amazing packages on top of that which can be great extras, I certainly install a few of these from James' list everytime I hit File -> New!

5 Must Install NuGets for New Xamarin Projects by James Montemagno

Null Pointers 30: Mobile Payment

In this episode, we discuss mobile payment. Since COVID-19 has made contactless payment the preferred standard, so has mobile payment been used by more and more people.

Null Pointers 30: Mobile Payment by Null Pointers

Zoom, Point, Outline, & Magnify The Screen During Presentations & Coding on Windows

Although not Xamarin specific, this video from James is super useful for anyone making presentations or doing demo's on Windows. I know a lot of the community, including a lot of our wonderful contributors, are also public speakers so this video is definitely handy!

Zoom, Point, Outline, & Magnify The Screen During Presentations & Coding on Windows by James Montemagno

The Xamarin Podcast Episode 83: Wrapping up 2020 by looking ahead to 2021!

It's the end of the year and in December's podcast James and Matt wrap up 2020 by talking about a cool new app that lets you draw 360 degree sketches with the Surface Duo - made with Xamarin.Forms! Azure Mobile Apps v4.2 is official, there's a brand new Microsoft Q&A site. And you don't want to miss a sneak preview of what's to come with .NET MAUI!

https://www.xamarinpodcast.com/83

Let Users Pick The Icon for Your iOS App with Xamarin.Forms

With the AlternateIcons APIs in iOS you can let your users change the icon of your app after it is downloaded from the store 🤯. In this video we will learn how to enable this functionality in a Xamarin.Forms application by leveraging the DependencyService and implementing just a few lines of iOS specific code. Such exciting, much wow!

Let Users Pick The Icon for Your iOS App with Xamarin.Forms by Gerald Versluis