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 […]

Handling Orientation Changes in Xamarin.Forms – 5 Approaches

I have been working on a project for a cross-platform mobile application using Xamarin.Forms, and my team has found it surprisingly difficult to determine the best way to handle orientation changes in the application.

Styling Custom Components in React Native Using TypeScript

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. interface Props { textStyle?: TextStyle; viewStyle?: ViewStyle; } class BlogPost extends React.PureComponent<Props> { render() { return ( <View […]

Three Habits to Break on Large React Native Projects

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. If you read much React Native code, you’re bound to pick up a few habits that cause […]

Programmatically Connecting to WiFi in Your Xamarin.Forms App

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 […]

Adding an EmbedIO Embedded Web Server to 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.

Drawing Shapes with SkiaSharp

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 […]

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