Xamarin Evolve 2013 – Day 4

And so, Evolve 2013 has come to an end. Time flies when you’re having fun. This was day 4 for us in Austin. Four days of Xamarin mobile goodness.

This was another interesting day. It started off with a session by Josh Clark from Global Moxie, and author of Tapworthy on user interface design and touch. While his message – have users directly interact with content instead of indirections, such as buttons – wasn’t revolutionary, he had a couple of nice and inspiring examples to show us. Apps that have implemented some innovative UI’s. A nice session to start the day with.

Oh, and he had a picture of an OCD Chef’s cutting board… man I gotta have this in my kitchen 🙂

After that, I went to Marek Safar‘s session on Using Async in Mobile Apps. He shared some good tips and pointed out some pitfalls around SynchronizationContext when using Async.

Most of the day was spent in the hallways of the Hilton though, talking to people, meeting all the faces I have in my Twitter stream in person. This was awesome. Great to share a passion for mobile development with Xamarin and talk face to face about our experiences. Thanks Greg, John, Wally, Ben, Nic, Stuart, Miguel, Nat and all those I forgot to mention for catching up.

Of course, Marcel (@marcelv) and I did our own session titled “Sharing 80% of Code on iOS, Android and Windows Phone”. We decided to give our own take on code sharing, and how to achieve this in a low barrier, simple way. We spent a lot of time during the conference, speaking to developers with all different levels of coding skills and we found that a lot of them were impressed by some of the frameworks and approaches that were being presented for achieving code reuse, but for whom all of this went a bit over their head. These frameworks tend to hide a lot of clever tricks, and you also run the risk of over-abstracting. So we took our lessons learned from a real life example app we built for a customer, and explained some small but clever architecture and coding tricks.

We got great response afterwards, and got some requests for sharing some of our code. Marcel and I will be working on a blogpost, showing all of the constructs we presented today. Have an eye out for Marcel’s blog. We’ll put it up there and I’ll cross post it here as well.

I visited Nic Wise‘s session about MonoTouch.Dialog as well. It’s tough to be the last session of the day, but he did a good job. I’m not entirely convinced that MonoTouch.Dialog is a solution in every scenario, but it does provide a neat way to quickly code up an iOS UI.

So after that, it was time for the closing keynote already… Nat and Miguel announced Evolve 2014, and in order to show their commitment, five lucky birds in the audience won a ticket. Awesome, can’t wait for the next installment of this awesome conference.

In closing, I’d just like to give my compliments to the whole Xamarin staff and the production company for putting together an inspiring conference. I loved the attention to detail that was visible everywhere. I enjoyed the vibe, the great food, and the fantastic content.

See ya’ll next year!