Chapter 3. Making It Look Pretty and Logging In

While Xamarin.Forms provides the basics of a user interface experience, it provides just that—a very basic user interface, functional but plain. With a bit of effort though, it is possible to produce custom UI components across the various mobile platforms.

In this chapter we shall:

• Understand how Xamarin Forms performs the UI tasks

• Look at the customization of the user interface using a custom renderer

• Apply these changes to allow for an improved user login experience

Introducing the standard UI login experience

Held within the source code examples in this chapter, you will find a simple Xamarin.Forms application called BasicUI. All the code for this section is taken from there. It is very minimal. When executed, you will see the following:

The iOS and Android UIs

While these are purely functional, they don't exactly look nice. The problem is that we can't change the look and feel very easily. This is due to the technology behind Xamarin Forms.

Abstract this, abstract that

If you think of any user interface, you will find a lot of commonality, as given in the following table:

UI element	Android name	iOS name
Label Editable text Image Table View Dropdown Lists	TextView EditView ImageView Table Layout View Spinner ListView	UILabel UITextView UITextField UIImageView UITableView UIView UIPickerView UITableView

Each of these will have their own properties (such as size and color), and each will have their own events. The point is that there is...

Summary

We have covered a lot in this chapter. If you've followed the chapter and looked at the code examples, then you should have an understanding now on how Xamarin Forms goes about both simple and more complex tasks and some of the ways you can use the native platform to provide facilities not available in the PCL.

In the next chapter, we shall be looking at how we can make the best use of the Portable Class Library, the power behind a Forms application.

The rest of the chapter is locked

Summary

We have covered a lot in this chapter. If you've followed the chapter and looked at the code examples, then you should have an understanding now on how Xamarin Forms goes about both simple and more complex tasks and some of the ways you can use the native platform to provide facilities not available in the PCL.

In the next chapter, we shall be looking at how we can make the best use of the Portable Class Library, the power behind a Forms application.