Greg Shackles

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NYC Code Camp 8: Mobile Apps

The next edition of the NYC Code Camp is coming up this weekend, and I have pushed out companion apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone that are all available now. I’m pretty pressed for time right now so I’ll keep this short and sweet. You can find the apps by searching the appropriate app store, or you can use these links: iOS Android Windows Phone If you’re interested, the source for all…

Building a Real-Time Photo Gallery with Xamarin, SignalR, Azure, and WebAPI

Lately I’ve been throwing around the idea of writing an app for my wedding, and started thinking of what I’d want to put in it. One feature that I thought could be fun would be to let guests upload photos directly from the app and display them both to other guests and on our site in real time. In this post I’ll go over how I was able to quickly put together a…

Updates On My SignalR Fork and Xamarin Support

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about my SignalR fork, so I wanted to just take a few minutes to give some quick updates on that. The reason I had been maintaining my own fork of SignalR was that I wanted to use the client library in Xamarin.iOS and Android apps, but there was no official support. Obviously maintaining this kind of fork can be difficult and time consuming in order to…

On Gmail and the Future of Hybrid Apps

Yesterday Google released a big update to their Gmail app on iOS, which brought with it some real improvements over the last version. Since the last version was released, Google acquired the Sparrow team, who was undoubtedly a big force behind the new UI. Gmail users on iOS, myself included, will likely be rather happy with the update, but that’s not really what I find most interesting about it. Out With The Old If you’…

Returning Results From View Models in MvvmCross

I’ve been doing a lot of work with the MvvmCross framework lately, and so far have been really enjoying it. As I was building out my application, I found myself wanting some functionality along the lines of Android’s StartActivityForResult method, where the application would navigate to some screen that would return a result back to the calling screen. In iOS this kind of thing would normally be done with a modal view controller. Since…