I recently ran into an issue with providing style properties to custom React Native components written in TypeScript. When defining the type of the style property, we were using the ViewStyle and TextStyle types provided by React Native.
Read more on Styling Custom Components in React Native Using TypeScript…
Working on a large(ish) React Native project presents some unique challenges for web and mobile developers. Isolating components from one another is a great way to make refactoring easy, but it leads to some pretty gnarly directory hierarchies.
Read more on Three Habits to Break on Large React Native Projects…
With the dawn of the Internet of Things, smart homes, and connected devices, mobile apps have become key elements of creating harmony between everything. Most IoT devices require users to provision their devices on a home wireless network, which can sometimes cause poor user experience. However, apps have the ability to ease these pain points by programmatically connecting to wifi networks. Read more on Programmatically Connecting to WiFi in Your Xamarin.Forms App…
On my current project, we were searching for a good way to fake out our API for testing purposes. One idea that my teammate came up with was to create a local server within the actual Xamarin Forms app so we could make API calls to it. Read more on Adding an EmbedIO Embedded Web Server to Your Xamarin Forms App…
My team was working on an activity tracking application and wanted to be able to display segments of time on a radial gauge. When implementing this feature, I initially tried using some libraries specifically designed to build arcs, but I was disappointed by their lack of flexibility. When my pair recommended looking into SkiaSharp, I was pleased to discover that not only could I build a radial gauge, but I also had quite a few options as to how to build it. Read more on Drawing Shapes with SkiaSharp…
The device on our current project has two unique software development kits (one for Android and one for iOS). My team wanted to use Xamarin.Forms to create an application for the device so that the core logic of the app could be stored in one place.
However, in order to also incorporate the platform-specific SDK methods, we had to export Java code (for Android) and Swift code (for iOS) as libraries and then import those libraries into a Xamarin.Forms project. Read more on Exporting a Java Library to a Xamarin.Forms Android Project…
I’ve been watching React Native for a while. The idea of using a React (and Redux) approach to developing cross-platform-ish native apps is really appealing. Since I have no React Native experience, I wanted to understand how much work is required to get started. Read more on Getting Started With React Native – Easy or Hard?…
Android Snackbars are, unfortunately, not as tasty as they sound. But they are extremely useful for showing errors or other lightweight feedback to a user–with minimal setup required. This is a brief tutorial for setting up a basic Snackbar, adding actions, and customizing its appearance.
Read more on A Quick Android Snackbar Tutorial: Setup, Action Handling, and UI Customization…
We’ve been using Redux a lot lately at Atomic, and we’ve come to appreciate how a centralized holder of application state can simplify application architecture. In a few different projects, we’ve used this architecture as inspiration for mobile applications in Objective C, Java (for Android), and Swift.
As my team’s current project has morphed from a heavy Ember.js app running in a thin PhoneGap web view into a thin Ember.js front end driving a rich Xamarin back end, we’ve had to change our approach to build automation. Here’s how we leverage custom build steps in Xamarin Studio to make our workdays easier.
Read more on Supercharging Xamarin Studio’s Play Button with Custom Build Steps…