Build LOB and Cognitive Apps with Our New Xamarin Components [New Release]
Whether you're looking to compliment your desktop or web app with a mobile one, or just need innovative UX with cognitive behavior - Telerik UI for Xamarin is here to support you.
Let me introduce you to the new additions in the R2 2018 release of Telerik UI for Xamarin.
Meet Conversational UI
We are proud to announce the Xamarin version of Conversational UI – a modern UI for chat interfaces. The component itself is called RadChat and can be tied to all the major conversational UI APIs or services available today, including Microsoft Bot, Google’s API.AI and Amazon Lex, and can also be integrated in peer-to-peer scenarios.
Besides the basic text messages we also introduced variety of pickers, such as list view, calendar, date and time pickers, which can be utilized both as inline messages or as an overlay. In addition, we provided the means to introduce suggested actions and a variety of cards in the control.
These features, as well as the MVVM friendly APIs, theming and highly customizable abilities of the control allow for creation of a natural and engaging conversational flow with a great user experience. We know that most chatbots today are not very user friendly - instead of saving time they often do the opposite - and we have worked hard to make sure this control will help you deliver useful and effective chatbots.
Let me also share some interesting blog posts on the topic that you may want to check out: Introducing Conversational UI, Modern UI for Chatbots, Designing a Conversational Chatbot Experience and The Anatomy of a Chatbot.
Navigation and Hierarchical Data with the New TreeView Control
Based on popular demand, we are introducing the TreeView control in Telerik UI for Xamarin (currently in beta). It is useful in scenarios where hierarchical data needs to be displayed, such as rendering the file structure or displaying an org structure. It's also effective for mobile app navigation, making it easy for the user to understand and navigate this kind of data. Here are highlights of its features.
- Hierarchical Navigation: RadTreeView significantly improves the navigation and user experience of your application where hierarchical structure is required.
- Commands Support: RadTreeView strictly follows MVVM best practices and provides an intuitive and easy-to-use set of APIs that allows different aspects of the RadTreeView control’s behavior to be handled and/or completely overridden. RadTreeView exposes a Commands collection that allows you to register custom commands with each control’s instance through the RadTreeView's Commands property.
- CheckBox Support: Telerik RadTreeView displays checkboxes next to each item. The RadTreeView allows the user to check/uncheck the nodes and to perform various tasks with the collection of checked nodes. The Tri-State CheckBox mode of RadTreeView allows for RadTreeViewItems' CheckBoxes to have an additional, third state - Indeterminate.
- Data Binding: Simply setting the collection of custom business objects as an ItemsSource in combination with a "HierarchyAdapter" class is enough to visualize the hierarchically-structured source.
- UI Virtualization: The user interface uses virtualization to display the required elements, meaning that they are created only when needed and only for the currently visible cells.
- Theming Support: RadTreeView comes with built-in theming support that allows you to easily build slick interfaces with the look-and-feel of a predefined theme.
New Control: BarCode with QR support
The BarCode control allows you to generate and display many popular and some industry-specific symbologies. Barcodes are highly utilized in industries such as retail, manufacturing, postage & shipping, healthcare, as well as governmental and administration facilities. It is a great addition to our toolset and a valuable weapon to have in one’s arsenal when he or she embarks on a new quest to conquer the next project. Here are some of the features delivered with RadBarcode:
- Support for different one-dimensional barcodes: RadBarcode supports EAN13, EAN8, UPC-A, UPC-E and Code39 symbologies.
- Support for different two-dimensional barcodes: This includes the popular QR code and PDF417.
- Three sizing modes: RadBarcode provides three sizing modes that will help you fine-tune the rendering of your codes.
- Styling capabilities: RadBarcode exposes ForegroundColor and BackgroundColor properties that can be used to customize its visual appearance.
Telerik UI for Xamarin ♥ Azure
Utilizing cloud services in mobile applications is common today. To empower you when building mobile applications, we've added articles on Azure integration in our documentation.
Toolbox in Visual Studio for Mac
Back in R1 2018 we introduced a toolbox in Visual Studio (on Windows) to make it easier for you to jumpstart your application.
Since than we have been working on delivering the same goodies to our Mac OS users, and I am happy to announce that with R2 2018 the toolbox is also available in Visual Studio for Mac, versioned 7.5 or higher. Enjoy!
ListView Enhancements
Based on your feedback we have been hard at work enhancing our popular ListView control. With this release, we are introducing:
- Support for expand/collapse of groups
- Various interaction events such as ItemTapped, ItemHold, ReorderStarted, ReorderEnded and GroupItemTapped
- Useful scrolling APIs such as ScrollItemIntoView
- Ability to style the reordered item
Culture Support in NumericInput
RadNumericInput allows you to define the format of its numeric value through a StringFormat property. Any culture-specific symbols in the display format will be applied according to the UICulture of the current thread. If not set explicitly, the UICulture is taken from the target device.
Telerik UI for Xamarin SDK
Due to the high popularity of our SDK examples, which provide developers with hands-on demos for a variety of the controls and features in the suite, we have completely revamped our demos. Feel free to take a look at them at this link. As always, your feedback is most welcome!
Try it Out and Share Your Feedback
Make sure to download and try the latest version of Telerik UI for Xamarin to explore all the new components and features.
We'd love to hear how this all works for you, so please let us know your thoughts by visiting our Feedback portal or by leaving a comment below.
Watch the Webinar
Don't forget to watch the Telerik R2 2018 Release Webinar recording, which covers all the features and updates to the Xamarin suite as well as the other .NET products in our portfolio.
Rossitza Fakalieva
Rossitza Fakalieva is a Technical Manager, Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies and a Director of the Bulgarian chapter of the global Women Who Code organization. She previously worked on the Telerik engineering team and defines herself as .NET enthusiast. She loves to empower others to grow in their career and in the tech field—by teaching, by delivering courses and presentations, and as part of her daily job.
Related Posts
Comments
All articles
Topics
Latest Stories
in Your Inbox
Subscribe to be the first to get our expert-written articles and tutorials for developers!
All fields are required