At Evolve it was announced that Xamarin were going to support theming for Xamarin forms, there is an active discussion here.
https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/65476/new-xamarin-forms-features-announced-at-evolve/p1
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/xamarin-forms/themes/
I did ask the question about custom controls and this was the response:
"The ability to theme third party controls comes from 1 of 2 mechanisms. First if the third party control is composed of smaller base controls and uses Control or Item templating it will just work automatically. If however if is not, the vendor would need to release its own theming for the control at this time."
With that in mind, do Telerik intend to support this feature which we intend to use in the future, I know it's early days but I thought I'd highlight this new features in Forms.
Also, will the Telerik controls work with the designer preview announced at Evolve?again early days and I think it's only in the Alpha channel for Xamarin Studio but Visual Studio support is coming.
4 Answers, 1 is accepted
Indeed support for theming in an exited news on the XamarinForms side. We will definitely consider the opportunity for theming support in our components. At this moment we are trying to keep the native look and feel of our components. This means that we put efforts in making the Telerik UI for XamarinForms components look the same way the native components do. When customers use our RadListView and deploy their app to Android platform the items are with light foreground as opposed to the iOS platform where the foreground of the same items is dark. This contradicts with the idea of having a common theme throughout all platforms thus very interesting discussions are yet to come in Telerik. One thing is sure. When we decide what our approach will be we will announce it.
Yes. Currently the designer preview is available in the Alpha channel only thus we have not tested it, yet. However, design time support is something that we will be proud to have in our suite and most likely we will implement it at some point. The design time support on our side will be discussed and evaluated once it is officially announced by XamarinForms. Meaning this is yet another feature that keeps us exited, but it will be evaluated once it is official.
Hope this answers your questions.
Regards,
Pavel R. Pavlov
Telerik
Rank 1
Hi Pavel,
Thanks for your response. For whatever reason I can see it in my email but your response isn't showing here.
This tends to happen with random posts in our forums. This is why I will copy/paste the same answer here so that others from the community will be able to access this information.
Hello Norman,
Indeed support for theming in an exited news on the XamarinForms side. We will definitely consider the opportunity for theming support in our components. At this moment we are trying to keep the native look and feel of our components. This means that we put efforts in making the Telerik UI for XamarinForms components look the same way the native components do. When customers use our RadListView and deploy their app to Android platform the items are with light foreground as opposed to the iOS platform where the foreground of the same items is dark. This contradicts with the idea of having a common theme throughout all platforms thus very interesting discussions are yet to come in Telerik. One thing is sure. When we decide what our approach will be we will announce it.
Yes. Currently the designer preview is available in the Alpha channel only thus we have not tested it, yet. However, design time support is something that we will be proud to have in our suite and most likely we will implement it at some point. The design time support on our side will be discussed and evaluated once it is officially announced by XamarinForms. Meaning this is yet another feature that keeps us exited, but it will be evaluated once it is official.
Hope this answers your questions.
Regards,
Pavel R. Pavlov
Telerik
Rank 1
HI Pavel,
thanks for fixing that up and thanks for confirming your considering these new exciting features.