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…
Read MoreTL;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…
Read MoreRecently I've been playing with a lot AI and seeing how it can be used in mobile apps to enhance the experience offered to the user. Currently I am playing with facial recognition using the Azure Cognitive Services Face API. This is a stupidly powerful API that can do a LOT of different things: Detect faces in images Analyze those faces to detect…
Read MoreIn 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…
Read MoreOne cool new feature in Visual Studio for Mac is the ability to create NuGet packages from your projects automatically whenever you compile. This new feature is thanks to a cool project started by Xamarin called the Nugetizer 3000 (I do love Miguel's naming conventions). It's really easy to turn this on. From your project open the project properti…
Read MoreAs much as I'm loving MVVMLight it does have some limitations. The one I've hit recently is how well it doesn't work when you are using AppCompat (though to be honest I think it's more down to how hacky AppCompat seems to be). I'm using AppCompatActivity as my base activity class to get an action bar supported on older API versions. The problem…
Read MoreToday I've finally moved to the world of continuous deployment - albeit for one of my projects only so far, but it's a start. For my JimLib open source API I've automated the whole deployment process so after checkin it builds and deploys to NuGet automatically. Steps in the process I do all my development in Visual Studio, which now can connect…
Read MoreMy second NuGet package is now available: JimLib.Xamarin. This contains a selection of helpers to make developing iOS apps with Xamarin easier (WinPhone/Android will come later when I have an Android license/Android device/Windows Phone device to test on). It's all open source - code is on GitHub, symbols are also available (as talked about here)…
Read MoreSince releaseing JimLib onto NuGet, I've been dogfooding it as much as possible for my own development. One area I noticed was lacking was in symbol support - if I wanted to view the inner workings of my classes I had to decompile the source using ReSharper. Not an ideal situation. Luckily there is a better way. SymbolSource is a free service t…
Read MoreFor pretty much every project I've worked on I've used the same set of extensions and helper classes to make my life easier. For example: Fluent API on strings myString.IsNullOrEmpty() instead of string.IsNullOrEmpty(myString). An ObservableCollectionEx<T> class that allows adding multiple items but only raising on CollectionChanged event.…
Read MoreI'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…
Read MoreI've just released the first alpha version of Complexion, available on my GitHub page. This is my first true open source API, which I hope to put up on NuGet in the near future. This is a portable .Net API that connects to Plex - either to a local Plex Media Server specified by it's IP or hostname, or via MyPlex to discover your media servers. T…
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