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…

It's no secret that I'm a big proponent of testing, and lately I've been getting a lot of questions around how to approach getting started and what technologies to use. While I have a good amount of content coming out around this, some already announced, some to be announced soon, I thought I would also try to take some time to put together a few posts on the subject as well. In this post I'm going…

As I've mentioned on my blog before, I like to use Xamarin's UITest library (and Calabash, by extension) to help automate the generation of app screenshots. This allows me to reuse my existing UI testing code as well, making it incredibly easy to create the generation scripts. Earlier this year I ran into an issue where the screenshots being generated for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were coming out at a lower resolution than expected,…

We use a lot of different fonts throughout the different apps on our platform, and often it can be a little bit of a chore to figure out the correct string to feed to UIFont.FromName() in order to properly instantiate a font from the files. One approached I've used in the past is to throw some lines in my app's startup code like this: foreach (var family in UIFont.FamilyNames) foreach (var fontName in UIFont.…

Apple's new wearable is finally making it out to users, which means now is the time to start building apps for it! First, let's take a look at the different pieces that make up a watch app. Watch App: While you might think that this is where most of your app logic will live, watch apps actually offload all real work to their parent apps. The watch app itself effectively contains just the user interface and…