Sunday 27 September 2015

iOS 9-ify your Xamarin App

With the iPhone 6s models now available, it's possible to build and test all the great new features of iOS 9 with Xamarin. To demonstrate, I've tried to squeeze as many iOS 9 features as possible into one sample: To9o app (that's "Todo" but with a "9" :-) The c# code is on github and screenshots of each iOS 9 feature are shown below.

3D Touch

3D Touch can used a few different ways, but requires an iPhone 6s to test (the Simulator doesn't support 3D Touch). I started by adding these two:

Multitasking for iPad

If the app can resize its UI appropriately, it should work fine for multi-tasking!

ContactsUI

The "Todo" app doesn't traditionally need an interface to the Contacts list, but I added it just to give this new API a try :)

New Search APIs

The new search APIs let you expose content to search and Siri. I've added both:
Notice the Back to Search button in the navigation bar.

UIStackView

This new layout option makes it much easier to build screens that 'scale', and also makes it even easier to support RTL languages (see below).
* Note: currently UIStackViews must be drawn using Xamarin's Xcode integration, but the built-in Xamarin iOS Designer will support them soon!

Collection View Changes

The main Todo list is a UICollectionView rather than a table, so it can demonstrate how easy it now is to re-order items with two simple methods added in code.

Right-to-Left Language Support

The entire app can now automatically flip (including UINavigationController animations) when displaying RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew (note: machine translation used for example, apologies for any inaccuracies).

SFSafariViewController

This new API makes it easy to implement an in-app web browsing experience with a line or two of code. I've used it just for an "About" window.



All these improvements are explained in Xamarin's iOS 9 docs, and the code is available to review. It is still a work-in-progress so check back for more updates. 

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