We’re excited to announce that Crosslight implementation of PropertyCross sample is now officially available for download. In case you haven’t heard about PropertyCross, it’s an open-source project aimed to help developers selecting the right framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. There are a handful of frameworks currently participating with this project, from native to HTML5, hybrid and more. For more information, jump straight to PropertyCross website.

The Crosslight implementation of PropertyCross doesn’t only take code sharing to the highest level, it also demonstrates the best practices in building cross-platform apps, particularly leveraging Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern for maximum separation-of-concern, repository pattern for data access, and IoC for dependency management.

The following chart shows the code sharing analysis based on code metric calculation.

Targeting three platforms — iOS, Android and Windows Phone, the Crosslight’s PropertyCross implementation yielded the fewest line-of-code among the available frameworks, thanks to the comprehensive features already built into Crosslight, which include form builder, enterprise framework, offline data service, REST service, pull-to-refresh and dozens of UI components. For more details about the new features in latest Crosslight release, check out the release notes page.

Here’s some screenshots of the Crosslight implementation of the PropertyCross app.

Although the PropertyCross sample has fairly basic specifications, it’s built with design best practices in mind, making it a great starting point for your Crosslight learning journey. It’s also a great reference sample as it demonstrates various Crosslight’s key features. Without much ado, please download the sample from our Git Server here.

Please note that the sample requires latest Crosslight build (3.0.5000.184) which was introduced in my previous blog post. For an in-depth guide to build and run the PropertyCross sample, please refer to PropertyCross Sample documentation.

Best,
Jimmy

Crosslight 2.0 Update 4 has arrived with tons of new features! New syncing services with push notifications, major improvements for iOS, stability improvements to Enterprise App Framework, and more. iOS now supports even more buttery-smooth scrolling, automatic dynamic cell height support, automatic aspect ratio calculation in thumbnail, automatic selection persistence in navigation drawer, and more. Check out the full release notes here.

In addition to hotfixes, we’re now updating the Mobile Studio installers for both Mac and Windows on every release (instead of just service pack or major release). With all our deployment processes automatically taken care, we want to make sure you get the latest product bits on every available channel, whether it’s from the update manager, access from your account, or through the trial download site. Furthermore, the new installers now clearly show the version of the Crosslight build to increase visibility of new installer builds.

We are truly excited to announce that the ultimate cross-platform development toolset now sports even more features and stability updates. This new service pack update includes a new localizable business template, over 50+ item templates for Visual Studio, dynamic localization service, new template definitions for iOS, major stability updates for Android, support for application-wide single sign-on, and much more.

The Crosslight Project Wizard now includes an additional and noteworthy template, which is the localizable business template. The new localizable business template allows you to change the language of the application dynamically at runtime, thanks to the dynamic localization service. If automatic language is set, when the device’s language is set to the one supported by the application, then the language changes automatically. However, you can also force an application to use a specific language of your choice, regardless of the language setting used by the device. The following screenshots show the improved Crosslight Project Wizard and the running app respectively.

We have also shipped more than 50 templates for Visual Studio, ranging for variety of projects, this includes, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and shared Core project. The templates itself is clear and concise, with instructions inside each template on how to use it. Your development process will be significantly accelerated since you can now quickly add common Crosslight items to your project. Say goodbye to the tedious, error-prone copy and paste.

In addition, Crosslight for Android platform has received major stability improvements, including the support of Xamarin.Android.Support.v4 library, revamped overall lifecycle, elegant rotation handling to ensure that view state is restored without performance degradation, improved tab caching, and reliability of the Android services, such as camera service, location service, social services, and more.

So far, we’ve only touched the surface of what’s revamped in this SP1 release. For a complete list of the updates, make sure you check out the Crosslight 2.3 release notes in our Developer Center page.

All the installers on our site have also been updated to reflect the new bits. Of course, this update is free of charge for customers with existing subscription for Mobile Studio or Premier Studio. Click here to sign in and access your downloads. If you haven’t tried Crosslight today, request a trial now and see how Crosslight transform the way you build cross-platform apps entirely.

Last but not last, we hope you enjoy Crosslight as much as we love building it! Stay tuned for our upcoming video tutorials and hands-on guide to apply these exciting features in your apps!

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

We’re very happy to introduce the release of our flagship development toolset for Silverlight and WPF, ClientUI 10. ClientUI 10 has now equipped with powerful enterprise reporting services that allows you to author any kind of reports quickly and easily. What’s also great about the enterprise reporting services is also that the reports are completely viewable in Crosslight applications.

Not only that, push notification services introduced in Crosslight 2 takes away developers’ pain of having to tediously configure the necessary configurations to allow push notifications on their apps. Crosslight 2 has streamlined this process into a single unified entry point, starting from registering the device token to the platform service, receiving the device token back and saving them to the WebAPI database, and much more.

The social networking services also allows developers to perform various social network operations such as authenticating with social networks, getting the user profile info, getting list of friends, sharing content, and much more. What’s great about the social networking services, is that services are completely UI-agnostic. You can design any kind of views to use with our social network services and have them in your application, just the way you want it to be.

Watch as Nicholas introduces you to the integrated enterprise reporting services, how to view the reports on Crosslight apps, push notification services for Crosslight and how to send them across multiple devices. Last but not least, the social network services that allows you to perform various Facebook authentication completely with custom UI.

You can also find the recordings to the first and second day of the webinar, in case you’ve missed them. Also, visit our Developer Center to learn more about Crosslight. It contains hundreds of documentation topics, illustrations, walkthroughs, video tutorials, and more. If you have any questions regarding Crosslight, feel free to open up a new thread at Crosslight community forum.

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

Building enterprise apps will almost certainly involves data access. Crosslight aims to be the holistic solution you need to build enterprise mobile apps quickly and easily. Therefore, in this release, Crosslight 2 ships with powerful data access that supports the latest Microsoft techonlogies such as WebAPI 2 and MVC 5. To accelerate your development even further, Crosslight 2 took the extra step of creating entity designer extensions for VIsual Studio 2012 and 2013.  The entity designer extensions allow you to create reusable entity models, entity context, entity controllers, and entity services.

Watch as our Chief Technology Officer, Andry Handoko Soesilo, introduces you to the plethora of data access services such as using the entity designer extensions, explaining the concepts of data synchronization and RESTClient for streamlined data retrieval, creating a simple mobile CRM app complete with incremental loading and pull to refresh, and much more.

Also, visit our Developer Center to learn more about Crosslight. It contains hundreds of documentation topics, illustrations, walkthroughs, video tutorials, and more. If you have any questions regarding Crosslight, feel free to open up a new thread at Crosslight community forum.

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

Crosslight 1 marks a great start for developers jumping into cross-platform mobile development. Built solid grounds, the MVVM pattern, Crosslight paves the way for extensible, maintainable, scalable, testable, and making your code highly reusable to use on four platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8.

Crosslight 2 introduces an even more comprehensive additions to the powerful toolset to easily create enterprise mobile apps in just a very short time. This includes versatile data access services, beautiful UI components such as the navigation drawer, advanced master detail view, two new templates: business app template and the navigation drawer template. Watch the webinar recording to see how you can leverage Crosslight 2 and take advantage of its powerful features and start developing your own mobile apps today.

Also, visit our Developer Center to learn more about Crosslight. It contains hundreds of documentation topics, illustrations, walkthroughs, video tutorials, and more. If you have any questions regarding Crosslight, feel free to open up a new thread at Crosslight community forum.

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

In my previous blog post, I’ve covered how to create a new business app using the Crosslight Project Wizard. Today, I would like to share how to handle push notifications in Crosslight apps using the new Unified Push Notification Services introduced in recent release. This video will cover push notifications for Crosslight-powered iOS, Android and Windows Phone applications. You will also learn how Crosslight has streamlined all the push notifications intricate processes such as registering the device with the platform store service (App Store, Play Store and Windows Store), obtaining the device token and saving it to the WebAPI database. Without further ado, check out the video below.

You have seen how Crosslight elegantly streamlines and handles push notification-related processes into streamlined entry points. To learn more about this topic, visit our developer center: Handling Push Notifications, which outlines the concepts and architecture of the Crosslight push notifications. If you have any questions, feel free to post it in our community forum, or drop us a mail.

Till next time,
Nicholas Lie

To start off a wonderful new year in cross-platform mobile applications development using Crosslight, we have released another video tutorial to help you better understand how screen navigation in Crosslight works.  This is the first of two video parts that covers push navigation, modal navigation and list navigation in Crosslight.

As you may have aware, navigation is a very complex subject in mobile apps development – not to mention various kind of navigation across multiple platforms. The navigation in a single platform itself, for example Android, requires deep understanding on how Android works and its user experiences pattern. This could probably take weeks to months only to make “usable” simple navigation works – including passing data between different screens, capturing input, back mechanism, rotation handling, layout persistence, and more.

Thankfully, we’ve done all those heavy lifting works – so you don’t have to. The good news is we’ve managed to streamline various navigation scenarios across different platforms into a single, unified API – so you can build powerful navigable apps with a single set of codebase. With the screen navigation scenarios fully covered across iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 – you should be able to focus on what is more important: business processes, user experience, and visual aspects of your app. With Crosslight, surely cross-platform mobile development had never been easier. Check out the new video tutorial below to learn how navigation works in Crosslight.

To learn more about Crosslight navigation, check out Designing Consistent Navigation Interface in our online documentation. Should you have any further questions, feel free to raise a thread in our forum. Stay tuned for more Crosslight video tutorials. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel as well!

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

We have released two new video tutorials on Crosslight to help you better understand how to develop better mobile applications using Crosslight.

Understanding MVVM Pattern in Crosslight

This video tutorial outlines in general how the MVVM pattern works in Crosslight apps development. You will learn how Crosslight leverages the MVVM concept in order to produce cross-platform projects with a single shared application layer. By the end of this video, you will be able to grasp the MVVM pattern in general as well as getting the right mindset when building apps using Crosslight.

Building Simple Tip Calculator using Crosslight

This video tutorial explains how you can build a simple tip calculator app using Crosslight  within minutes that target all four major platforms at once (Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows 8). This video aims to highlight the data binding capabilities in Crosslight that leverages the MVVM pattern found in .NET applications to mobile apps development. You can find the source code for this video in our GitHub link: https://github.com/IntersoftSolutions/CrosslightSimpleTipCalculator

Should you have any further questions, feel free to contact us at technical@intersoftpt.com or raise a thread in our forums. Hopefully this video will give you a clearer concept how Crosslight works and how you can slash development time in more than half and increase your productivity. Stay tuned for more Crosslight video tutorials. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel as well!

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

In the early September 2013, we proudly announced our comprehensive toolset for the mobile development world, the Mobile Studio. Using Mobile Studio, now you can rapidly build powerful mobile apps on the world’s top platforms – iOS, Android and Windows – with a single application codebase. Check out our site for more information on Mobile Studio. To help you get started with Mobile Studio, this blog post aims to guide you from start-to-finish on how to install Mobile Studio on both Mac and Windows, as well as preparing your machine for cross-platform development for both platforms.

Mobile Studio ships with the all-new powerful mobile development toolset that will change how you program native apps, using Microsoft’s and Xamarin’s technology. Introducing Crosslight, the world’s first robust, extensible mobile toolset that leverages the MVVM pattern that extends over world’s 4 most famous mobile platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. To get a general overview of what is Crosslight, how Crosslight add values to your business, and understand how Crosslight works, see our blog post: Getting Started with Crosslight. Also check out our site for more information on Crosslight.

Installing Mobile Studio

To help you install Mobile Studio on Mac and Windows, check out the following videos.

Windows

Mac

Preparing Your Development Environment

These videos will help you in configuring your machine for development using Crosslight.

Windows

Android

iOS

Windows Phone 8

Windows 8

Mac

Android

iOS

After you have successfully followed these videos, your machine should be ready for cross-platform development using Crosslight. Should you need any further assistance, feel free to contact us at technical@intersoftpt.com or you can visit our forums. If these videos helped you, don’t forget to like our videos and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more videos.

Cheers,

Nicholas Lie