Back in 2013 I blogged about a library I published called JVFloatSharp that provides a slick floating placeholder on iOS after you start typing into a text input: Outside of a few small bugfixes and upgrading to the unified API a few months back I really haven't needed to mess with it much, and have been successfully using it in many apps in the meantime. I'd always intended to make it available on NuGet, but I…
Building Context-Aware Apps with Beacons
Recently I've been giving some talks on building context-aware apps with beacons, so I just wanted to quickly publish my content around that in one place. If it's not immediately obvious, I think beacons and context-based technologies are seriously awesome. First, Carl and Richard were nice enough to invite me back on .NET Rocks! to talk about this stuff as well. You can find that episode over on their site, or in any of the usual…
Write Automated UI Tests for iOS and Android Apps
Previously in this column, I've written about unit testing iOS apps, but what can you do when unit tests just won't cut it? If you're a Web developer you're probably already familiar with libraries like Selenium, which allow you to drive automated testing of your Web app's front-end. Xamarin offers a library named Xamarin.UITest that enable the similar possibilities for your iOS and Android apps. In addition to being able to run those tests locally…
Tips For Uploading Apps to Organizations in HockeyApp
Like many others right now, we're in the process of migrating our testing infrastructure from TestFlight to HockeyApp before the TestFlight shutdown next week. As we did in the past with Xamarin and HipChat, we also open sourced the FAKE helper we made for uploading builds to HockeyApp. For example, to upload a build to HockeyApp and then send a notification to a room in HipChat you can do: HockeyApp (fun p -> {p with…
Presenters in MvvmCross: Nested Modal Navigation in iOS
When navigating to a new view controller in iOS there are two primary ways to do so: pushing it to the navigation stack (the standard way), or "presenting" it which results in a modal-like experience where the new view comes up from the bottom of the screen. This interaction can be useful to convey context to the user, since it feels like a modal interaction that will return them to the current screen afterwards,…