Xamarin & .NET Developer Events in August
This begins a blog series on how to improve your iOS app with changes that wont take more than 2 minutes to implement. The aim of this series is to ensure that every iOS app you create conforms to iOS conversions. This series should be especially useful to those developers who have never used iOS as a primary mobile OS and therefore have no knowledge of platform conventions.
The problem
Its easy to forget when developing cross-platform applications that code reuse should be secondary to creating compelling user experiences. The end user wont be judging your app in the respective stores based on a code reuse percentage but rather on its speed, functionality and user interface.
One common issue I find in iOS apps developed by developers with limited exposure to the platform is the creation of static views. Lets say you’re creating an about page, you drag a view controller into your storyboard and start adding labels. It looks great as a static image in the IDE but apps should never be considered static entities. I can promise you that your users will be pulling that view and expecting it to bounce. If you don’t believe me then feel free to add Xamarin.Insights to your app and track this.
My suggestion is to ensure all your ‘static’ views have a little bit of bounce as this will make them appear more interactive. One great example of using bouncing in an iOS app is Tweetbot. If you’re new to the platform then I highly recommend buying this app and seeing some of the best custom animations and polish of any iOS app I’ve used.
Adding a bit of bounce to your app
Bouncing your view is incredibly easy, in fact is as easy as adding a control and checking a box. First things first, select your view within the storyboard editor. Add a UIScrollView from the toolbox into the view and then tick the ‘Bounce Vertically’ checkbox in the properties pad. Once your controls as nested in the scrollview, you’re done!
Wrapping up
Thats all it takes to add a tiny bit of polish to your existing Xamarin.iOS app! Make sure you’re using this on all those static views to make them appear more interactive.
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