Book Image

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin

Book Image

Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin

Overview of this book

The main goal of this book is to equip you with the required know-how to successfully analyze, develop, and manage Xamarin cross-platform projects using the most efficient, robust, and scalable implementation patterns. This book starts with general topics such as memory management, asynchronous programming, local storage, and networking, and later moves onto platform-specific features. During this transition, you will learn about key tools to leverage the patterns described, as well as advanced implementation strategies and features. The book also presents User Interface design and implementation concepts on Android and iOS platforms from a Xamarin and cross-platform perspective, with the goal to create a consistent but native UI experience. Finally, we show you the toolset for application lifecycle management to help you prepare the development pipeline to manage and see cross-platform projects through to public or private release.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Cross-Platform Development with Xamarin
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Design philosophy


One of the biggest pitfalls while designing an application for cross-platform use is to impose the design patterns from one OS to the other one. In the mobile world, each platform and users of those platforms have certain expectations from an application. These expectations can be as insignificant as an icon on a common feature access button (for example, the share button on iOS and Android), or as important as the layout of a view (for example, tab buttons on the bottom and top of a view on iOS and Windows Phone, respectively). In this paradigm, the designer's responsibility becomes much more complex, since the design, while creating a brand for the application, would need to be inviting and appealing for the users of the platform.

User expectations

Mobile platform users are creatures of habit. One of the key deciding factors of the adoption rate of a mobile application is how easy it is to use and how discoverable the features are for the platform users. It is important...