In addition to how an app looks and what it does, a major contributor to an app's UX is how well it performs. With so much competition and an abundance of high-quality apps available in the app stores, users now have high expectations for apps to be quick and easy to use. Mobile devices also simply don't have the resources you might be used to when working on desktop or Web applications, so it's always important…

Lately I've been doing a lot of work around adding instrumentation to basically all the things, which naturally includes my apps. It's common practice to instrument things on the server-side of the API using awesome tools like NewRelic, but that's only part of the equation. Obviously we need the server to respond as quickly as possible so being aware of that metric is essential, but on top of that the user also has to wait for…

Recently I had the pleasure of working with my friend Jesse Liberty on a new Pluralsight course focused on helping you get started building Xamarin apps in a test-driven fashion. In under an hour he walks you through building out a real app using tests right from the start, running those tests on both iOS and Android, and also getting into writing UI tests to run locally as well as in Test Cloud. If you're looking…

Writing UI tests for Xamarin is awesome and easy using Xamarin.UITest, which allows you to write tests in C# that work across both iOS and Android. It provides a nice API to interact with your apps from test code, allowing for performing many common tasks for interacting with an app such as tapping elements, entering text, scrolling, swiping, etc. Typical UI Tests Using a tip calculator app as an example, here's what one such test…

I've been a big fan of Estimote (and beacons in general) for awhile now, but only just recently had a chance to finally play around with their nearables, dubbed Estimote Stickers. These stickers are similar to beacons, except that their primary purpose is to be attached to physical objects, and in addition to proximity also broadcast more contextual information about the object. This extra information contains a bunch of interesting details such as temperature, orientation, and…