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At a mobile developer desk:
- 1 PC
- 1 Mac (for iOS Build)
- 2 Android phones and one tablet
- iPhone, iPad
- a lot of cables, too many of them7 -
Area of focus: Native iOS dev
Why: Spent years trying hybrid tools, dealing with the most ridiculous errors, bugs and issues you can begin to comprehend and then ... something magical happened. I got a book on Objective-c, learned a little, tried a simple app ... and it worked ... like properly worked, and on all the devices without taking half the RAM.
I'll say that again as I don't think it landed. In Objective-c, I got no issues where only the CEO's phone + OS version meant I couldn't load a map and a pin (looking at you titanium!!!)
In Objective-c, I wasn't promised storyboards and autolayout, only to find out they are completely different, and may god help you trying to google the issues, as the only ones to show up would be the native tools (looking at you Xamarin)
In Objective-c, my app doesn't instantly consume 125mb of RAM to load a fucking webview (looking at you ... well nearly every other hybrid tool)
... it just works. Then Swift came along and things only got better.13 -
After 2 years in a small company as an all around software developer (started with xamarin for Android/iOS, then Unity, then OpenXML, augmented reality, virtual reality and .Net MVC...yeah all that and lots more) I changed to another company and I'm here 1 month and some days. I am super enthusiastic and I like it here!! They're more specific and professional, exactly what I need at the moment.
What is the problem, you might ask?
I was given some projects, I have done most of the work but now an issue arrived. I did almost everything and now we're waiting for some answers needed before closing the projects. And I get bored. I want to work!! I need to continue the streak! Just give me something and I'll make it happen!! I am boreeed!!
What is wrong with me? Am I buggy or something?2 -
So....
I was asked to transfer a spaghetti Android/iOS project to xamarin for a bank client yesterday because "that's what they use".
This is a crm/loyalty app that has been around for 2+ years now (you can imagine the mess). On top of that I have no knowledge of c#, .net or xamarin.
So I ask: "When is this supposed to be delivered?"
Boss: "It was scheduled for 2 weeks ago but let's say 2 weeks from now"
Me: "..... This is a huge remake it won't be even close to ready in 2 weeks"
Boss: "Let's check on the progress in 2 weeks and see how it goes"
Why is it hard for bosses to provide an actual timeframe???
He's been pulling the same crap with junior devs for years and of course they get nervous and create more spaghetti code...
Anyway long story short (not) I have an interview Monday!
Let's hope it's not more of the same!
P.S.: to junior devs: When you are given a deadline... IGNORE IT.5 -
Cross platform mobile with Xamarin, an internship asked me to learn Xamarin for them, I found that the docs Xamarin had were surprisingly helpful compared to other places
After continuing to pursue mobile with Xamarin I now feel I know multiple native apis very well (iOS and Android) and have found my favorite language (C#) so I've also learned a ton about how code and compilers work and all sorts of other things
Xamarin has been an incredible learning tool9 -
Learning to code using xamarin, I'm fucked off with kids iOS/android apps that are free and have too many ads or aren't free but suck balls. Apologies if my language offends.5
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I’ve got to build an app in 3 weeks that handles basic image editing and async requests. It’s gotta support both iOS and Android.
It’s also gotta scan barcodes.
What should I use?
Cordova?
Cordova+ionic?
Titanium?
Xamarin?
Dart/flutter?
Try and cram it through in native java/Kotlin and swift?
Something I’m missing?7 -
Modern cross platform mobile app development is a lie. Maybe if you do Apple first, I don't know. Maybe xamarin is better than Cordova, idk. I've spent more time tweaking to one platform than I would have just starting with a platform and writing two or three code bases. I've got more if iOS statements than I know what to do with and the Windows code is some hacky transpiled mess because UWP isn't ES6 ready for reasons. Also, some error and image handling just doesn't translate. All this and I've got significantly less features than I could have implemented in the same time writing in a native language.3
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It's 3am, just submitted an app for review for iOS... go to take one last test drive on the release build for android, and I get stuck in an infinite loop of "system up stopped working". An factory reset and an hour later, I'm saying fuck this, android waits, and fuck whatever Xamarin did to my phone. While I'm at it, fuck Apple for making me have 20+ icons in different sizes, and their shitty walled garden approach to a so called marketplace.4
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Trying to reliably do Xamarin iOS development has sucked almost all the fun out of software development for me over the last four weeks.
Xamarin Android? Minor hiccups but mostly smooth sailing.
Xamarin iOS? 5th level of development Hell.6 -
Xamarin on windows visual studio
2 days to install
2 days to build the basic project on both Android and ios8 -
Use Xamarin, they said. It will be easy, they said. You will only need to write your UI once, they said. NOPE
Documentation is shit, I've been sitting here for the past hour and a half figuring out how to add an icon to a button in their shiny XAML thing for which they have NO DOCUMENTATION. THEY WANT YOU TO HOE IT OVER C# BUT THEY ONLY GIVE EXAMPLES IN C#. And now I'm trying to figure out where I can download the iOS UIBarButton icons, because you can't use native icons and fuck apple too, they don't want to give em to you.
What a hellhole.
All while my client is constantly spamming me in all ways, distracting me, marking issues as "supercritical" (which makes an alarm ring on my phone and is only meant for emergencies) and otherwise distracting the living daylight out of asking for screens of the UI.
AND I STILL PREFER IT OVER ANDROID STUDIO. Don't even get me started on that one.2 -
For all the cheap-ass sys admins:
I wouldn’t pay 100$ a year to apple just to have push notifications when my server fucks up or an user fill my support form but I want to know that in real time but I have iPhone(forget about FCM).
So I downloaded pushbullet to my phone and integrated its API in my server and when something important happen I get completely free notification which (thanks to url schemes in ios) redirect me to my server administration app.
Note: I used xamarin for my management app to be ready for the moment when I switch back to android.2 -
!rant
Got a permanent contract today after 1½ year of temporary contract. 🤩
I'll be doing mostly whatever I want, but it starts with a new mobile app for both Android and iOS. Maybe I'll try Xamarin or React Native. However, I don't know iOS (Swift) yet, so maybe I'll learn it along the way. It depends on what would be best for the users.1 -
that moment when you apply for an internship and they ask you to develop for both android and ios, and now you feel bad for laughing at xamarin1
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What applications have you all used for developing iOS and Android apps on a Linux machine? I've been wanting to use Xamarin on my windows machine but I've decided to move to Linux. I'm looking for something that will let you develop iOS and Android apps on a Linux platform like Fedora or Ubuntu. Any ideas?13
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They told me Xamarin Forms could create an app for many platforms
They didn't tell me that the Forms extensions for APIs would not work at all with the Android extensions, iOS extensions and I would need to reinstall them for each platform
They didn't tell me that at the end, I have to write individual code for each platform.
I was promised an all-in-one toolkit. I'm just writing code for Android and iOS apps, PLUS forms
I can't even find a reliable PDF generator for this. Documentations are outdated and don't work, either that, for it takes a million steps to generate a PDF file2 -
One time, we picked up a Xamarin project and both Android and iOS teams had to pick a developer to handle it. After talking over it with my iOS bro, I decided that I hate C# far too much to start a project on this, even though I wanted a new experience, so iOS bro took over it. I got handed another iOS project in the meantime. iOS bro decides to take a free week from work after like a month or so of working on that project.
GUESS WHO DECIDED TO COME OVER AND WORK WITH US THAT WEEK? THE OWNERS OF THE PROJECT (they were handling the API). Guess who had to drop all projects at once and work for a whole week on a project he had no idea about in a programming language he only had a remote idea about? THIS GUY.
So, aside from the fact that I had no idea what I was doing, I also had the pressure of the owners working right next to me (they were cool people, but it's still a stress). That week really raised my stress level through the roof, as I doubted myself everyday that I would be able to be productive on that project. I got myself a free week too after that.
But yeah, this experience really made me doubt my skills as a programmer, as Xamarin was supposed to be just a cross-platform way of developing an app.
All in all, I've never had to work on that project again... but it was still an "I can't fucking believe it" moment when, one month-ish later, the project was to be scrapped and reprogrammed on ye olde Swift.1 -
I like rants that are thought provoking and push a message forward regardless of whether they may sting a little, so for my first post on here I'd like to hit at home with many of you.
Html5 "Native" Applications are not needed. Let's cover mobile first of all, the misconception that apps are written in either javascript or Native android/ Native ios environment. Or even some third party paid tools like xamarin is quite strange to me. OpenGL ES is on both IOS and Android there is no difference. It's quite easy to write once run everywhere but with native performance and not having to jump through js when it's not needed. Personally I never want to see html or css if I'm working on a mobile app or desktop. Which brings me to desktop, I can't begin to describe how unthought out an electron app is. Memory usage, storage space for embedding chromium, web views gained at the expense of literally everything else, cross platform desktop development has been around for decades, openGL is everywhere enough said. Finally what about targeting browser if your writing a native app for mobile and desktop let's say in c++ and it's not in javascript how can it turn back into javascript, well luckily c++ has emscripten which does that simply put, or you could be using a cross complier language like haxe which is what I use. It benefits with type safety, while exporting both c++ and javascript code. Conclusion in reality I see the appeal to the js ecosystem it's large filled with big companies trying to make js cross development stronger every day. However development in my mind should be a series of choices, choices that are invisible don't help anyone, regardless of the popularity of the choice, or the skill required.8 -
I honestly thought spending a full vacation away (fifteen days) from a certain platform would make it feel better to use. As If I was overreacting due to fatigue. Maybe that platform is not slow :you are tired.
Back to work, code and design in a satisfactory time, all is well. Except until building. That. Took. Five. Minutes. THIRTY.
Yeah, Xamarin ios still is a raging bullshit. -
So, for my final year project I'm tasked with creating a mobile app for iOS and Android.
A YouTuber I watch avidly decides to go with Xamarin for his next app. Cool, I think: I'll go with Xamarin for my app too (I'd like to test run the app on PCs just for fun).
Looks for Xamarin tutorials, nice, found one! Goes into VS, creates a new project. I add "Hello World" to the centre of the screen.
*F5* Build started... 5 minutes later I come back and it failed. No reason why it failed, all parentheses closed, semicolon at the end of my only line of code.
Watches YouTuber's new video, he has the same problem ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ. He adds a button, builds, build fails. Tries a second time, build succeeds. And this goes on for a couple of minutes while he's troubleshooting the problem.
Oh well. Time for hell I guess.14 -
started to try out xamarin. a ideal way to write it once and use it in 3 apps. on windows all was fine. android sdk adn ndk installed everything ok. starts to looked at ios hmm, you need mac to build project, simulate. oh wait even the UI designer you need mac pc.
WTF is going on here, are you serious apple. come to think of it, now i get how apple sales numbers are high. when developers and companies need to by apple pc in order to make a fucking app for them. but that's not all you need to pay 100euro a year to publish the app.15 -
Life is to take decisions. Which u prefer
Google vs Shodan vs 🦆 🦆 go
Angular vs vue vs react vs other
Gnome vs unity vs KDE
Atom vs vscode vs sublime or other
iOS vs android vs other
Natives bs ionic vs react native vs xamarin vs flutter
Gmail iCloud or outlook or proton mail
Camel, pascal ,snake case
C# or Java or python
Sql or not sql
Debian , fedora ,linux mint or kali
Server side rendering or client side
Aws vs gcloud vs Azure vs ibm cloud
Firefox vs chrome vs safari
Free without privacy or ads or paid without ads or privacy
Nintendo vs pc vs ps4 or xbox
WhatsApp or telegram or other
Sleep at night or not
Coment your favorite12 -
During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.
Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.
Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.
The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)
It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.
Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.
You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:
1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries
2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc
From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.
This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.
So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.
Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P
Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.
And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.3 -
Best : creating a fully customizable, performance-oriented ETL service from ground up.
Bad : developing in xamarin forms in Android .
Worse : porting said xamarin forms app to ios. -
The prerequisites for the MSIngnite 2016 pre-conf session 'Visual Studio and Xamarin' were grossly not complete. Many individual's Visual Studio required the Xamarin/Android/IOS specific updates, no one could open/build the session projects, slow wifi, expectation of Azure account (most didn't). Good content (Andrew and Peirce were great), but a waste of my time.
Any other MSIgniters? Rant on! -
Trying to fix an urgent issue with our Xamarin iOS app and a known bug in Xamarin "IOException: Sharing violation on path /Assets.xcassets/AppIcon.appiconset/Icon-1024.png" is blocking me.
Luckily I still have my old laptop from my last upgrade on standby, boot it up and it's not using the affected version of Xamarin. 😃
Instead this one has the also know "/ios/release/mono/mini/mini-arm64.c:5439, condition `native_offset % 4 == 0' not met" blocking issue when debugging. 🤦♂️
I just want to do some work. ☹3 -
Xamarin vs Flutter
I already know c# but I’m thinking it’s better to learn Dart + Flutter than carry on with Xamarin (only ever worked on the back end parts of Xamarin so not familiar with the layout syntax and the ui side of it).
Xamarin seems to be so clunky (to be fair more the dev environment than the end result), even on a powerful machine it’s a pig to work on.
Our project uses Xamarin forms, without any extra MVVM framework such as Prism and it just seems a bit shit from what front end code I’ve seen (could be the devs).
So given that I’m not sure that holding out for MAUI and expecting it to be a silver bullet is a good idea.
Is the UI code for Flutter any cleaner?
Is the dev environment more reliable?
Or is another option better, such as ReactNative or Ionic ?
(Particularly if one of those would let you develop an iOS version without access to a Mac)2 -
September : started programming in xamarin Android. Slow, buggy and undocumented as hell.
October :getting used to Android. Might be nice after all.
November :started programming at ios.
December 2nd:still can't comment on it. Program hasn't finished compiling yet.
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