10ish Cool New Products

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Jesse Liberty

What follows are products I’ve recently discovered, that now I can’t live without.

Back Pack

Let’s start with the best backpack I’ve ever owned

This is the Cocoon, which sells for about $100.

There are two main pockets. T Cocoon pocket he larger has a suspended pocket for your Mac (or if you insist, your Lenovo ) and a second one for your iPad (Surface?).

The outer pocket is where the magic happens. There are criss-crossed strips of expandable nylon that securely hold everything from your USB stick to your power supply, iPhone or anything else you carry. It makes finding the wire you need right now, a snap.

Run out of room? They also sell rectangular supplements that do the same, but slip into your backpack, for the stuff you use less often.

Continue reading →

Posted in Essentials, Opinion, Product Reviews | 1 Comment

Xamarin MVP

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Jesse Liberty

What can I say, I’m truly grateful and proud…

Keeping good company

Special thanks to Lino Tadros and Falafel Software for paying me to have way too much fun with Xamarin.

Posted in Xamarin | Tagged Xamarin, Xamarin MVP | 2 Comments

Scroll To in Xamarin.Forms Grouping

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

In a recent blog-post I showed how to use the new Scroll To feature in Xamarin.Forms. In this posting I’ll show how to go to a particular entry within a group and also how to go to a particular entry.

We start with the code were using in the previous post. …. The key difference is that we add another parameter to ScrollTo. Continued here

Posted in Xamarin | Tagged Grouping, Scroll To, Xamarin.Forms | 1 Comment

ScrollTo in Xamarin.Forms ListView

Posted on December 24, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

Today we tackle another new feature in 1.3: ScrollTo.

This allows us to scroll to the beginning of a ListView or to the end or to a particular entry. Let’s return to the grouping code we created here. We’re going to make some minor changes to illustrate ScrollTo

To illustrate how this works, let’s add a button to the XAML which will trigger the scrolling,

The event handler is identified as GoToLastItem. We’ll implement that in our code behind,

public void GoToLastItem ( object obj, EventArgs e ) {

var target = Employees[ Employees.Count - 1 ];

EmployeeListView.ScrollTo( target, ScrollToPosition.Start, true );

}

Continued here

Posted in Xamarin | Tagged ScrollTo(), Xamarin, Xamarin.Forms | Leave a comment

Messaging in Xamarin.Forms

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

In recent posts I’ve discussed Styles and Triggers in Xamarin.Forms 1.3 (which is still in Community Preview). Today I’ll discuss Messaging, which is critical when using MVVM.

Publish and Subscribe

Messaging in Xamarin.Forms implement the Publish and Subscribe pattern. This means that any class (or page) can subscribe to a message and another page can publish that message. This may cause the first page to take some action. Continued here

Posted in Xamarin | Tagged Messages, Xamarin.Forms | Leave a comment

My Favorite Books of 2014

Posted on December 20, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

In 2014 I read (according to GoodReads) 47 Kindle books and (according to Audible) 101 audible books.

This year I read zero books on paper.

Here is my short list of the very best:

Far from the Tree
Ulysses
What If?
The Innovators
The Sixth Extinction
Thirteen Days in October
The Most Dangerous Book In the World
The GoldFinch (and all of Donna Tartt)

But not necessarily in that order.

Enjoy, and Happy New Year!

Posted in Opinion | Tagged Books | Leave a comment

Product Recommendation -SaneBox for Email

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

I don’t usually write about individual cool products, but if email is making you crazy this is a product you really want to check out.

It is called SaneBox and it separates your mail for you automagically into inbox, BuilkMail, View Later, and News. You can then train it which email belongs where, though it generally gets things right without training.

More, you can move email to Next Week or Tomorrow and it leaves your inbox, only to reappear when you said.

Further, you can forward to any arbitrary time/date (e.g., Tuesday.10am@sanebox.com and it will come back then. Does a whole bunch more, is highly customizable and generally great.

Enjoy, and I think if you sign up we both get a small discount.

Posted in Product Reviews | 2 Comments

Triggers in Xamarin.Forms 1.3

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

Yesterday, I wrote about one of the new features in Xamarin.Forms 1.3 (Technology Preview 2), Styles. Today I’ll take a first look at Triggers.

Triggers

The key idea of Triggers is “When this happens, do that.” More specifically, “When this property has that value, then set this other property to this new value.” Huh? Perhaps this is easier to show than to explain.

Let’s suppose we’re building a form and we’d like to enhance the Entry control so that when the user is entering data the text color is blue, but when they are done the text color turns black.

Step one is to create a style in the Resource Dictionary and to give that Style a set of Triggers… Continued here

Posted in Xamarin | Tagged Triggers, Xama, Xamarin | 1 Comment

Xamarin.Forms: Styles

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

Xamarin.Forms 1.3 is now available in Community Preview 2 (the final community preview before release). While this is not a release version, it is close and worth taking a look at. It offers three new killer features:

Styles
Triggers
Behaviors

In this post, I will look at Styles. Continued…

Posted in Xamarin | Tagged Styles, Xamarin, Xamarin.Forms | 1 Comment

Xamarin.Forms – Groups and Jump Lists

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

My goal is to create a simple list of Employees with the employees grouped by Jump Lists the first letter of their name. I’d also like to create a jump list to allow the user to jump to a particular letter in the list.

To see the implementation, click here

Posted in Xamarin | Tagged Grouping, Jump Lists, Xamarin.Forms | Leave a comment

Using Mocks to test Xamarin

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

Many of us believe that Unit Testing is critical in any non-trivial programming. But Unit Testing can be difficult, especially the use of fakes. The most common fake is a Mock; unfortunately they are also the most confusing.

There are a number of Unit Testing libraries you might use with Xamarin, but the easiest to integrate is nUnit. For mocking, Moq makes great sense, especially as it works so well with nUnit. Continued here…

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Xamarin.Forms And Resources

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Jesse Liberty

Often, there will be multiple views in your form that share the same values (e.g., font size, color, etc.). There are a couple ways you can handle this:

Create a resource dictionary and then refer to the resources using the key and the keyword StaticResource
Declare constants and then refer to them using x:Static

While the names are very similar, x:Static and Static resources work differently. The former access a public static constant (or a public static property defined by a class). The latter, static resources, is a markup extension supported by xAML that depends on the creation of a resource dictionary.

Let’s look at how you might use both. More…

Posted in Essentials | Leave a comment