Wallace B. McClure

Many years ago, in fact pre-Java, I remember a hallway discussion about the desire to write a single application that could easily run across various platforms. At the time, we were only worried about writing applications on Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7.x. There were many discussions about windows, user interface concepts, and specifically a rather long discussion as to whether Mac users would accept a Mac application that didn't have balloon help. Thankfully, the marketplace answered this question for us with the Windows API winning the battle.

I'll be doing a Webinar on May 23 on the Xamarin Mono for Android Designer that is new with Mono for Android 4.2.  This is a free webinar presented by AppDev, please attend if you can.  Here is some info on the webinar:

This course is about how to use Mono for Android with Tablets and the new Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich release. The course introduces Android Tablets and Fragments, new controls that are available through Android 4.0, new application programming interfaces in Android 4.0, and new features available in the Google Android SDK Release 17 that can improve their development experience. This course also contains a module on the Android Design Experience, what developers can use to improve the user experiences, design suggestions from Google’s Android team, and some thoughts on how to improve the design experience via software code.

I'll be doing an eLearning event on HTML5 for Mobile with jQuery Mobile. There will also be a few items sprinkled in on ASP.NET Razor.

Mobile development is a hot item. Customers are buying iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and many other mobile computing devices at an ever increasing record pace. Devices based on iOS and Android are nearly 80 percent of the marketplace. RIM continues to be dominant in the business area across the world. Nokia's growth with Windows Phone will grow on a worldwide basis. At the same time, clearly web development is a tremendous driver of applications, both on the public Internet and on private networks. How can developers target these various mobile platforms with web technologies? Developers can write web applications that take advantage of each mobile platform, but that is a lot of work. Into this space, the jQuery Mobile framework was developed. This eLearning series will provide an overview of mobile web development with jQuery Mobile, a detailed look at what the jQuery Mobile framework provides for us, how we can customize jQuery Mobile, and how we can use jQuery Mobile inside of ASP.NET.

Multimedia is expected in today's mobile applications, and the fun isn't only for smartphone and tablet users. Mono for Android, based on the Mono project's open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework, can help you take advantage of Android Camera APIs in Visual Studio. In this article, we'll look at taking pictures, loading pictures, video playback and recording video.

This article resumes where we left off in "Working with Images and Animation on the iPhone and iPad with .NET and C#: Part 1," which looked at multimedia app development on the iPhone and iPad, including how to display simple images, take pictures with the device's camera, and perform some simple animation with the images. In this article, part 2, we'll look at how to perform more complicated animation using the NSTimer and UIView classes, how to display and record video, and how to edit the video.

Let's be honest: When debugging with Android -- and Mono for Android (MfA) on Windows by extension -- using the emulator requires patience. This isn't a condemnation of Mono for Android; merely recognition of the reality of having to live within the Android ecosystem. I've noticed that most developers who develop on Android tend to be using a Mac. I think this is due to the development experience on the Mac being better overall for Android.

I can now announce with much excitement that fellow author and friend Greg Shackles and I will be authoring a monthly column for Visual Studio Magazine on Mono for Android.  The link to the introduction is: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2012/04/25/why-mono-for-android.aspx