I recently bought some Estimote beacons (a 3rd party iBeacon-like device) - largely because they seem like a cool and nerdy kind of thing. It has an Android SDK which will allow Android devices to interaction with devices. With a little big of effort, I managed to create Xamarin.Android binding and port the sample Android project provided by the Estimote SDK.
You can see an example of the app in these screenshots:
A visually pleasant effect when deleting items from a ListView is to animate the row being deleted by gradually change the .Alpha value of the view from 1.0 to 0.0. If you’ve tried to animate the deletion of a row from a ListView in a Xamarin.Android application, you may observe some curious behaviour when rapidly scrolling through a ListView with many rows: the animation may appear on rows other than then one that is being deleted.
One of the handy things about the JPEG format is the ability to store meta-data inside the image using EXIF. There are a few libraries out there for the various programming languages that can help you out with this, and Android actually has something built in to the SDK - the class ExifInterface.
Google’s documentation on writing latitude and longitude to a JPEG are a bit light on details - they loosely hint at the format that latitude or longitude should have. (See the documentation for ExifInterface.TAG_GPS_LATITUDE). The API itself is pretty straight forward, but what Google doesn’t tell you is HOW the GPS coordinates should encoded.
Deploy early, deploy often is a popular goal in Agile methodologies. One easy way to support this to automate your build process. Last year at this time I would just use FinalBuilder to automate the builds of my Xamarin.Android pet projects. It doesn’t take much to set FinalBuilder, and it does provide support for a lot of tasks such as versioning .NET assemblies, manipulating XML, dealing with the file system, and so on.
The problem is that FinalBuilder is Windows only. OS X and Linux types are left out in the cold. As I find myself working almost exclusive in OS X when developing my Xamarin.Android applications, I was looking for a Windows free way to automate my builds.
Enter rake and albacore. rake is, of course the build system for Ruby.
