Layout safe areas for iOS in Xamarin Forms
Since the launch of the iPhone X there is a notch at the top of the screen on iOS devices that tend to be annoying to work around. You would have to add some sort of margin to avoid your controls to be overlapped by it. The problem with this approach is that you would have to take into consideration wether or not the phone was in landscape or portrait mode. To avoid these frustrations Xamarin Forms introduces a SafeArea flag that you can set on your Page Layout to ensure it’s content will automatically adjust the margin depending on the orientation of the device. You can set it with C# Or using XAML, see the ios namespace declared bellow and then how we set the flag right after And
Image caching in Xamarin Forms
Someone asked me about an issue they were having when showing a ListView that had an image for each cell. When the user would scroll the images would flicker and the UI would turn a bit slow. The images were being loaded from the internet. The problem the person was having was that they were not using a correct caching strategy for the images and now I’m going to explain how you can fix this problem in case it happens to you. Enough context, let’s do the caching If you want to add cache to your image you should use something like this: Some explanations ensue When you want to show an image you know you specify the Source of the Image. Probably as a URL or a route to
Adding fingerprint authentication in Xamarin Forms
Adding a fingerprint authentication for multiplatform projects have never been easier than with the Plugin.Fingerprint nuget package. But first… A few things to clarify about biometric/fingerprint authentication. These are implementation limitations by the technology itself and not introduced in any way by the Xamarin Forms implementation: You cannot save “the fingerprint”. There are two reasons for this: The detection of the fingerprint is done inside the hardware that reads the finger. By law you cannot, should not and for now, won’t have access to this information If your device has more than one registered fingerprint you cannot tell which fingerprint was used to authenticate. You can only tell if the sensor has or hasn’t received a valid fingerprint. Now to the main event To start you want to include the
Five questions about Startup Weekend
From May 10th to the 12th of the current year I will be volunteering as a technology coach in the next entry of Startup Weekend Fintech so I wanted to write a little bit about it. What is Startup Weekend Fintech? Startup Weekend is an event, kind of like a hackathon, where you get to develop a business idea from nothing to MVP and pitch it in 54 hours. Startup Weekend Fintech is the same but for business ideas related to Financial Technologies. The event is not free and I do not get any sorts of commissions from tickets sales. The cost is about US$15 per participant and you get food for three days, a nice badge, a shirt and a gift bag with useful stuff. Who should participate? Anyone
Configuring Loopback for audio recording on OBS
Today I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent here. At Megsoft we are using this tool called Loopback that allows you to route the audio output from an application to a virtual audio device. This feature is very useful if you are going to do streaming. We use it for two online shows called DevBorrachos and the .Net Friday Show. Here is a little guide on how Loopback works and how to set it up with OBS: First, you want to download and install Loopback. There is a free version that degrades audio quality after 20 minutes of use and there is a paid license for US$99. Launch it and you will see something like this: The Pass-Thru source enables other applications to send audio directly into
Top 5 APIs in Xamarin Essentials you didn’t know about
If you are familiar with Xamarin Essentials and want to get right into the totally not clickbait list you can click right here. Xamarin Essentials provides developers with cross platform access to a plethora of commonly used features and native APIs. At the moment of writing there are 29 apis and growing. Some of these features used to be pretty annoying to setup but now you don’t have to do any of that and can just focus on the business logic of your application. The best part is that if you don’t use a feature it won’t be included after compiling so there is no fear of fat output files. Xamarin.Essentials supports the following platforms and operating systems: Platform Version Android 4.4 (API 19) or higher iOS 10.0 or higher
