Showing posts with label iOS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iOS. Show all posts

Sunday 13 November 2022

Deploying a Canvas App direct to mobile devices

Overview:  Canvas apps have a feature called "Wrap" that can take a canvas app via a solution and allow it to be access naively on iOS and Droid.  This allow users to open the canvas app without going thru the Power Apps client on their mobile device.  The apps can be shipped using the app stores/marketplace or Microsoft Intune for enterprise deployment.

Enable the feature in your dev/un-managed environment using the "Power Platform Admin centre":

There is a great wizard that takes care of a lot of the underlying work such as registering the app in Azure Portal AAD.

Use the Wrap wizard (you'll need a lot of access rights on the Power Platform and Azure Portal)
Pick your package types, this post outlines the full process for Android (apk). Below shows the iOs file needed for the Apple store but you can distribute using InTune.
 



Friday 27 September 2019

Basics of Flutter

Overview:  Flutter is a UI toolkit built by Google used to create native mobile applications (and web sites (Hummingbird)) using a single code base.  Historically, I have tried to keep a single code base in the front end using Angular, KO or ReactJS for my websites and used PhoneGap to build pseudo native apps on Android and iOS.  This allows me to have a single code base and also deploy to Droid and iOS with minor tweaks on PhoneGap.  
Tips:
  • There is a Flutter add-in for Visual Studio Code.
  • Flutter uses "Dart" as it's programming language.
  • Dart is a strongly types object orientated language that compiles into JavaScript for websites, and "natively" for iOS and Droid.
  • Also can compile code for native Windows, Mac, Chromebook.
  • Everything is a Widget (layout widget, elements e.g. image, text, or a gesture widget (listens for actions like a tap)),
  • Add widget together to make a custom widget,
  • Widgets are either stateless e.g. picture or stateful e.g. textbox
  • import the material.dart to provide basic building blocks
The more I see of Flutter, the more I like it.  It is quick to build mobile apps and looks fantastic.

Cons:
  • Pretty new & hard to find skills
  • Slightly bloated on a native app - not noticeable to end users
Basic Environment setup:
  1. Surface Windows 10 Pro
  2. Visual Studio Code
  3. Flutter SDK
  4. Android emulator (I didn't setup iOS)
  5. Android device to load the package to try it out on a phone

Emulator Running using Flutter

Thursday 25 May 2017

Xamarin is fantastic-

Overview:  I am enjoying working with Xamarin, easy for any C# developer with a little experience and forethought to build decent applications.  Microsoft/Xamarin really reduces the barriers and makes building native mobile applications very achievable.  Nothing to do with SharePoint but maybe my next out of hours project will encompass O365.  I saw a demo at an Azure conference 2 months ago and thought it looks pretty straight forward.  MVVM with C# makes iOS and Android development of native apps easy.

Proposed Solution:  Scratch card game
  • Build a Web  Service for holding game and user details
  • Build UI to reveal scratch card for Android and iOS
  • Sign in using Facebook
  • Retain users winnings and games played information 
Summary: PoC is going well, deployed the Web Service and SQL back-end, registered with Facebook and can login.  Secured mobile apps Droid and iOS.

Tips: PCI projects and Xamarin forms projects do not play nicely together.  Choose the project type wisely.  Also get some help from a Xamarin developer, it is saving me so much time when I hit an unknown.