We just hit the 25 episode mark on our Gone Mobile podcast, which seemed like as good a time as any for a quick retrospective. We published our first episode in September of 2013, not really knowing what would become of it or if anyone would actually listen, but knowing that we wanted to try. More importantly, there are so many amazing people in this community that we wanted a place to be able to showcase…

In my last post I talked about one of the roadblocks I hit when upgrading to Android's new ActionBarActivity. That was definitely a major pain, but there's one other issue I've run into so far that I wanted to call attention to as well. This one didn't cost us nearly as much time as that last one did, but it was certainly unexpected. Our apps make use of a single activity and fragments for each separate…

As part of updating our apps to use the latest Android support library to bring in some of the nice material design classes in there, we also started switching over to using a Toolbar as our action bar. If you're just getting started in making the same upgrades in your app I suggest starting with this excellent post on Xamarin's blog that outlines what you need to do. Getting things migrated was easy enough but we…

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…

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,…