Noise from the Basement

Lately, Chris has been working on Xamarin notifications in Android, which you would have gathered from his recent blog posts. I have been tasked with designing an icon to go with this work. I’ve designed a few things before (Scary Sun being my best work), but this task seemed to be especially vexing.

How would I come up with something that captures the concepts of Xamarin, Saturday Morning Productions,  and notifications? It seemed like a lot to fit into a very small space. Now, when I think of being notified for something, I immediately think of bells. Like alarm clock bells. I drew a few iterations of an icon with a bell, but honestly, they looked kinda dumb. I’m not sure anyone would look at them and connect the three things together that I just mentioned. I wondered if I would get a flash of inspiration if I just let it percolate around my brain a bit.

In my previous example I detailed how to schedule notifications in Xamarin on Android but didn’t show the Xamarin Forms application reacting to that specific notification.  Let’s fix that.

First override the OnNewIntent method in the MainActivity.  We override this method so notifications will work if the application is currently running or is stopped and the notification started the application.  In the OnNewIntent method you put code that makes sure it’s a notification you want to respond to then extracts any needed information from the notification.  An example is below:

The great philosopher Henry David Thoreau once said: “Simplify, simplify.”

I actually didn’t know that Thoreau said that until I saw a reference to that quote in a Calvin & Hobbes comic. But that’s another story.

You might be wondering why we at Saturday Morning Productions haven’t written any blog updates about our Goal Buddy App project. Well, that’s because we have reached a bit of an impasse. Our master-coder Chris has written quite a few updates on the first version, which focused on scheduling tasks and having reminders for those tasks. It was cool seeing the app come together. But we started to wonder: how was this any different than using a calendar app?

The first beta version of the Xamarin Notification Plugin has been released.  This plugin allows you to send local notifications easily using Xamarin.  You can find the release on NuGet under “SaturdayMP.XPlugin.Notifications”.

More details and documentation can be found on the GitHub page.  You can provide feedback to us (bugs, features, etc) by entering a issue here.  Finally if you want the bleeding edge check out the MyGet feed.

Chris and I are late to the party, bidding our fond farewells to Stuart McLean.  But it wouldn’t be right to not pay our respects to the person who motivated us through many a chore.

Long before Saturday Morning Productions or Goal Buddy were even conceived, we were spending our Saturday mornings building a cold storage room under the stairs in our then-new house.  We can honestly say it is the opening riff of the theme music and the sound of the storyteller’s voice that encouraged us to get sawing and painting.  We even emailed him back then to let him know the impact he had on our routine.  Years later, during jam-making and harvest seasons, we have his show to thank for the completed room.