In my previous post I showed how to introduce search as type behavior into Xamarin.Forms app with standard Forms Behaviors.
Let’s see how to do it in other, more declarative and configurable manner, using Reactive Extensions (Rx) instead of Task and CancellationTokenSource.
Search as type functionality is quite often seen on the web as well as in mobile apps. Let’s see how to make it work in Xamarin.Forms.
Detecting on-screen keyboard toggles and proper handling of such changes can be quite tricky. Android tries to deal with those events on its own but its behavior is often far from perfect. iOS, on the other hand, leaves all the work to an app developer. Both approaches have its advantages and disadvantages but sooner or later each mobile app dev will have to face this problem.
Today’s mobile apps are rarely created as text-only. Most of them needs at least in-app icons for toolbars. In many cases you can find graphics for mobile platforms as ready to use resources on the Internet, i.e. Material Design icons. Sometimes they are prepared by graphic designers specially for your apps.
XAML compilation is (or at least should be) one of the default optimisation steps in Xamarin.Forms app development. It really speeds up the app especially on Android. Sometimes however it can cause some nasty errors like this one:
Standard Xamarin.Forms Xamarin.Forms.Editor control offers edit capabilities similar to Entry but for multiline text. Unfortunately unlike Entry it doesn’t support displaying placeholder text out of the box. Implementing this functionality with custom renderers can be tricky. Let’s see how to do this on Android and iOS.
Most of iPhone and iPad users can easily recognize icon badges - the pattern for application notifications typically presented in app icon or navigation bar. People that got used to this pattern might want to have the same user experience in their Xamarin Forms application. This post describes how to customize the navigation toolbar in iOS to dynamically display such elements.
Adding tap/click handling to Xamarin.Forms Label is fairly easy. You can do it both in XAML or code behind using GesureRecognizers collection like it is described in this recipe. Unfortunately if you plan to use this solution intensively in your app it will add quite a lot of repeatable code for setting up those handlers (especially in XAML)