Control When Android Apps Are Released to the Play Store with Timed Publishing

The timing for when to publish an Android app is critical — you need to advertise the app and let users know when it’s available. Unfortunately, the Google Play Console doesn’t give you that ability by default. Once your app is approved, it’s released to the Play Store immediately. You have control over when the […]

Compiling a List of Your Airship Tags

Airship (recently rebranded from Urban Airship) is a service that you can integrate into your mobile app or web application. It allows you to send push notifications to a targeted segment of your users based on a variety of filter mechanisms, including a series of Tags and Tag Groups.

Using SkiaSharp to Create an Inner Shadow in Xamarin.Forms

I’m currently working on a project that uses Xamarin.Forms, and the other day I started a story to implement some design on a multi-selection list in our mobile application. The design added checkboxes to each cell in the list, and each checkbox has a subtle inner shadow. This is a common design convention–so common that […]

Why Flutter Might Be the Best of Both Worlds

A little more than a year ago, I started working on my first project with native mobile applications. It has been wonderful learning the intricacies of the iOS and Android platforms, but I’ve noticed how cumbersome it is for a team to maintain two versions of the same application. It takes quite a bit of […]

Creating Material Design Chips in an Android App

Material Design was introduced by Google in 2014 as a visual language to create a universal design and style guide for applications. Along with Material Design, new widgets and controls were added to match the new styling. One of these elements is the chip. Chips function like buttons that can either be checked or toggled. […]

Adding Notification Badges to a Kotlin App

When building a Kotlin app, or any app for that matter, it’s pretty inevitable that it will contain push notifications. And with push notifications, it’s likely the app icon will need a badge. This is possible with the standard Android API, but unfortunately, the target SDK needs to be 26 or higher for it to […]

An Easy-to-Use TimePickerDialog for Kotlin

Android’s TimePickerDialog is fairly simple to use and works well if all you need to do is to choose hours and minutes. The problem is that you can’t restrict which times can be selected, set time intervals, allow seconds to be chosen, or style it in a meaningful way. The MaterialDateTimePicker library was made to […]

Building a Horizontal Picker or Spinner in Kotlin

A “picker” is a small scrollable list of defined values that looks like a combination lock with dials. It’s native to Swift. I think “spinner” would be a better name, because it looks like it spins. (Android has a “spinner,” but it’s really just a drop-down list. Annoying.) In this post, I will be showing […]

An Introduction to Content Localization in Android Apps

When creating any kind of application, it’s important to build it for the users you expect to be supporting. Because of this, it may be necessary to display different strings, images, and other content based on the language or region of your users. While creating the translations of an app can be a lengthy process, […]

Unit Testing Custom Xamarin.Forms Controls

When using Xamarin.Forms, the conventional wisdom is that you write unit tests around the ViewModel, but not the View. This approach works well for most cases with MVVM, but if you’re developing custom controls, it’s likely not sufficient. In this post, I’m going to dive into a bit of what it takes to successfully write […]

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