Introducing Xamarin UI July

Fellow community member Luis Matos has recently held a Xamarin Month initiative. During the entire month of February, someone from the community / Xamarin team posted a blog about Xamarin-related topics. I would love to give the concept a shot as well!

So how does this work?

Much like an advent calendar, a new blog post about a specific topic is posted every day by one of you, the Xamarin community. Each of the wonderful contributors posts it on their own blog after which it will become available in the calendar below. That way, you’ll have a surprise blog post to look forward to every single day! Blog posts will be written in English and will be about a single topic.

Sounds good, but what’s the topic?

Crafting a UI is an essential part of building an app. In recent updates, Xamarin has added more and more awesome features like Visual and Shell, and additional controls like CollectionView to enable developers to create better-looking apps. Since it also rhymes quite nicely with July, why not focus on UI in Xamarin?

Not very creative? Don’t worry, this topic is still fairly broad. If you have a hard time finding inspiration some possible topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Animations in Xamarin
• Getting started with Shell
• Creating a custom Visual
• Pulling off some advanced UI using CollectionView
• Tooling to use (icon font generation, LiveXAML, MFractor etc.)
• Recreating an existing UI with Xamarin
• Building a cool custom control
• Etc.

I’m sure you can come up with something interesting ;)

Sign me up, how do I join?

We need 31 writers to write a blog post each day. If you’re very inspired you’re allowed to write multiple blogs though! If you want to reserve a slot follow the steps below:

1. Reserve a slot on Twitter (using the hashtags #Xamarin and #XamarinUIJuly).
2. Think of a topic related to UI in Xamarin and send it to me on Twitter.
3. Write your blog post, in English.
4. Add a link to your blog post that links back to here, so that your readers can find the complete Xamarin UI July series.
5. Publish your blog post on the specified date (according to the calendar below).
6. Post the link to your blog post on Twitter with the hashtags #Xamarin #XamarinUIJuly

Below are all the slots and the people who have requested it. Once the calendar is full it will be a matter of waiting to see the first post appear! Requests will be handled in the order that they came in.

1. Design Tools for Xamarin Forms / Herramientas de Diseño en Xamarin Forms (Spanish) by Luis Matos
2. Create a kickass banking app using a BasePage in Xamarin by Steven Thewissen
3. Introducing xUber – Uber clone using Xamarin Forms by Rendy Del Rosario
4. Tiled image animations with Xamarin.Forms by Marco Kuiper
5. My two cents on Xamarin Forms Shell by Mario Galvan
6. Building a Bottom Sheet in Xamarin.Forms by Ravi
7. A (r)evolution for displaying data: Xamarin.Forms CollectionView by Luis Beltran
8. The Coordinate System in Xamarin.Forms and Android by Andrew Hoefling
9. Credit Card Payment UI in Xamarin Forms by Charlin Agramonte
10. Elegant Tabs and Rg.Popup for the Fancy UI World by Abdul Muhaymin Arif
11. Tab navigation for Xamarin.iOS using MvvmCross by Pranav Khandelwal

12. Adventures in modern previewing by Lachlan Gordon

    Off-calendar contribution Simple way to create a Floating Button in Xamarin Forms / Spanish: Agregando un botón flotante de manera sencilla en Xamarin Forms by Leomaris Reyes

13. Xamarin.Forms UI Challenges - Day vs Night by Kym Phillpotts
14. Was never written.
15. The basics to create custom Xamarin.Forms controls using SkiaSharp by Konrad Müller

16. The Run Away! app: Drawing gradient lines on top of Maps with SkiaSharp by Jean-Marie Alfonsi

    Off-calendar contribution Hot Reloading Declarative C# UI for Xamarin.Forms with CSharpForMarkup and LiveSharp by Vincent Hoogendoorn

17. [Xamarin UI Challenge] Art Plant Mall / [Xamarin UI Challenge] Art Plant Mall (Spanish) by Javier Suárez Ruiz
18. Let’s Play with CollectionView Layouts in Xamarin.Forms by Almir Vuk
19. Xamarin.Forms UI Challenge – Ficus IoT App by Luis Pujols
20. Creating beautiful Xamarin Forms apps using Atomic Design, F# and Fabulous by Mark Allibone
21. Was never written.
22. Currency UI in Xamarin.Forms by Vicente G. Guzman Lucio
23. Simplify Data Entry in Xamarin Forms with MappedButton by James Curran
24. Highlighting countries on a map in Xamarin.Forms / Zvýraznění zemí na mapě v Xamarin.Forms (Czech) by Martin Zikmund
25. Was never written.
26. Lottie Animations in Xamarin Forms by Kirk Patrick Junsay
27. Simple data validation in Xamarin Forms by Pieter Nijs
28. How to create an Initials View as custom control for Android and iOS / How to create a Labeled Switch as custom control for Android and iOS by Thomas Sebastian Jensen
29. Xamarin.Forms 4 In Action: Rapid Prototyping by Alejandro Ruiz
30. AirNZClone – Awesome animation tricks in Xamarin.Forms by Michael Ridland
31. Xamarin.Forms Shell — Let’s Customize The Flyout Menu! by Matthew Bailey

I’m talking to some other community members about doing something special on the 1st of August. What that is I won’t divulge just yet. You’ll have to wait. I will be doing a blog post myself as well, but that depends on which slots are still available in a while. I hope you’ll join me in creating some cool content for the community and let’s say another big thank you to Luis Matos for the initial idea!