iOS - Expecting someone geekier

Jim Bennett

Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, Xamarin Certified Developer, author of Xamarin In Action, blogger, speaker, father and lover of beer, whisky and Thai food. Opinions are my own.

Redmond, WA, USA
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Running AI models on iOS, Android and Windows using Xamarin

Featured Jim Bennett 20 Jul 2018 xamarin.forms, AI, windows, iOS, Android, onnx, nuget, technology, xamarin

I created a NuGet package a while ago to allow you to run models exported from the Azure Custom Vision service on iOS and Android in Xamarin apps from your cross-platform code. You can read about this here. Since then, the Custom Vision service has added ONNX export, meaning you can now run these models on-device on Windows as well. This meant it…

Xamarin Essentials

Featured Jim Bennett 08 May 2018 xamarin, technology, iOS, Android, nuget, Xamarin.Essentials

TL;DR - check out Xamarin Essentials in the official documentation. Like a lot of developers, I love how Xamarin allows me to share business logic between iOS and Android apps, and share UI using Forms, but still have access to the native APIs. But one thing has been missing - a consistent, out of the box way of accessing native APIs from cross-pl…

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 3, using the models offline in iOS

Featured Jim Bennett 17 Jan 2018 technology, xamarin, AI, CoreML, azure, cognitive services, custom vision, Porg, Image classifier, iOS

In the first part of this series I used the Azure Custom Vision service to create an image classifier to allow me to easily identify my daughters cuddly toys. Once created I tested it by uploading an image and seeing what tags the classifier found for the image. In the second part I accessed this model from a Xamarin app, so that I could use the c…

Binding iOS libraries in Xamarin

Featured Jim Bennett 19 Feb 2015 iOS, xamarin, xamarin.ios, xamarin.forms, estimote, ibeacon, binding

Update: Since writing this, James Montemagno from Xamarin contacted me to say they are working on an Estimote component. This is now available on the Xamarin component store. Check out his blog post here. I've been playing around with iBeacons a lot recently. They seem a really cool technology with a load of interesting potential use cases. My…

Images for an iOS app

Featured Jim Bennett 14 Aug 2014 Visual Studio, Technology, iOS, ios, javascript, technology, node

When developing for iOS there are a number of different image sizes needed. Just for the springboard icon you need different sizes for iPhones and iPads, both retina and normal versions. When you add spotlight icons (again both retina and normal), iTunes icons the list gets huge. To help with this and to practice my Node.js skills, I created a n…

Creating a NuGet PCL that works with Xamarin.ios

Featured Jim Bennett 07 Aug 2014 Technology, iOS, xamarin, nuget, xamarin.ios, pcl, nuspec, httpclient, portable class library

I've been playing with Xamarin.Forms recently to develop an iOS app. The aim is to use my portable open source Plex API in the app (more details of the app will come later once it's ready to release). The basic concept of Xamarin.Forms is to have a core portable class library containing all the application code, and very thin platform specific li…

Synergy

Featured Jim Bennett 16 Jun 2014 Visual Studio, Technology, Development, iOS, synergy, shared screen

As you've probably seen from my other posts, I'm developing iOS apps using Visual Studio on Windows as my development environment, and a MacBook Pro for running the actual builds. This is a pain when I want to test. As good as Ripple is, it's not as good as the actual iOS simulator. It's a pain jumping from one computer to the other. Thats wher…

Popping my open source cherry

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Jun 2014 Cordova, Technology, iOS, framework7, open source

Today the pull request for my first ever contribution to someone else's open source project was accepted and merged. It was a small bug fix to Framework7 - a really cool HTML5 framework for building iOS 7 style apps. I'm using it for my first cordova project and what it outputs looks just like a native iOS 7 app. Highly recommended. A big thank…

Using Visual Studio to develop Cordova apps part 2 - Creating an app

Featured Jim Bennett 27 May 2014 Visual Studio, Cordova, Technology, Mac, Development, iOS, Using Visual Studio to develop Cordova apps, angular, topcoat

Building on the previous post in this series, I thought it would be fun to try to learn Angular.js and include this in my Cordova app. I could also do with so nice looking widgets, so I decided to have a play with TopCoat. First thing I need is an app to build. One of my current 'First World Problems' is having to convert from US units (mg/dL) t…

Using Visual Studio to develop Cordova apps

Featured Jim Bennett 13 May 2014 Visual Studio, Cordova, Technology, Mac, Development, iOS, Using Visual Studio to develop Cordova apps

So after yesterdays attempt to create a 'Hello World' app using the new Cordova tools for Visual Studio, I thought tonight I'd try again. If you haven't heard the news, Microsoft announced a CTP of support for Cordova inside Visual Studio. Thats right, Microsoft is opening up to a world of other devices. The aim is to allow you to build HTML5 ap…