Kimserey's blog

Build your own Line chart for Xamarin.Forms with Custom renderers (Part 1) Last week I needed a line chart to plot expenses. I had two choices: use an existing library or draw the chart myself on canvas. I decided to go for the second - draw the chart using the Android Canvas API. I chose this approach because it gives me full flexibility to create a style and behaviour that match perfectly my application. Here’s the chart result: This tutorial will be composed by four points divided in two parts: 1. Xamarin.Forms custom renderer (Part 1) 2. Explore the Android Canvas API (Part 1) 3. Create a GraphView which will draw a line chart (Part 2) 4. Use it (Part 2) 1. Xamarin.Forms custom renderer Officiel documentation: https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/xamarin-forms/custom-renderer/ A custom renderer is a class used by Xamarin.Forms to define platform specific behaviours of your views. In this tutorial, we will be using a custom renderer to access the Android native Canvas API ...

What does DP, DPI, PPI and PX represent in Android? I’ve been playing with Xamarin Android for a while now and one thing that disturbed me when I started was the units of measure. What is the difference between DP, DPI, PPI and PX in Android? I found my answers in the Material design guide and today I would like to share my undertanding of the differences and bring a different explanation which hopefully will help you get a better understanding. This post is composed by three parts: 1. PX - pixels 2. DPI / PPI - pixels per inch 3. DP - density-independent pixel 1. PX - pixels Pixels is the most granular unit of measure. When talking about resolution 1920x1080, 2560x1440, etc… It represents the amount of pixels which fit in the screen. The higher the better but a second aspect equally important has too be taken in consideration - the screen dimension . Two devices with the same resolution but different screen sizes will not have the same display. For a similar resolution, th...

How to make a splash screen with Xamarin.Android The first time I had to implement a splash screen for a Xamarin.Android app, I was completely lost. Xamarin official documentation is great https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/user_interface/creating_a_splash_screen/ but without prior knowledge in Android, it is hard to follow. So today I would like to show you how you can create a splash screen for an Xamarin.Android app and provide more explicit information on what is happening and why is it done this way. This post is composed by 3 parts. 1. What's a splash screen 2. Implement the splash screen 3. Use the splas screen A full sample is available on my GitHub https://github.com/Kimserey/FileFoldersXamarin/tree/master . 1. What’s a splash screen A splash screen is a screen shown to the user while the application is loading in the background. Xamarin.Forms applications take few seconds before being completely loaded, therefore it is important to provide a splash scr...

Build an accordion view in Xamarin.Forms Few weeks ago I posted about absolute and relative layouts . Layouts are called Layouts because they contain children which are placed in a particular way. Xamarin.Forms has a lot of layouts and views to structure pages like grid, table view or list view. Today I would like to show you how we can use some of these basic views to build an Accordion view . Here’s a preview of the Accordion view: Full source code available on GitHub - https://github.com/Kimserey/AccordionView/blob/master/Accordion/AccordionView.cs This post will be composed of four steps: Create a BindableProperty Define the accordion expandable section Define the accordion view Usage sample 1. Create a BindableProperty As we saw in one of my previous post , Xamarin.Forms works around data bindings. View properties are bound to viewmodel properties. Default views like Label , Button , ListView or TableView come with the necessary bindable properties like Backgroun...