Categories
Apps

Dark Mode for Xamarin Apps

This week I have mostly been trying to get Dark Mode working with one of my Xamarin Forms Shell apps. This is the new feature available on most mobile OSs where the screen goes white on black (rather then black on white) to reduce glare at night. There is no “out the box” solution but after much googling and a bit of fiddling I found something that works.

There were three main changes I had to make to get it working.

  1. Modify the Shell part of the app.
  2. Modify the content of the various ContentPages.
  3. Modify the splash screen.

Starting with points 1 & 2, I referred to these two posts for their approach. Read them but bear in mind I had the following issues. The general idea is that you have two resource dictionaries, one for the light screen and one for the dark screen. The elements have the same names so you can swap them over at run time and it applies the new colours to the existing controls.

Shell & ContentPages

I am quite new to using StaticResources. Hot Reload is great as you can edit the XAML and see it update on the device. This light/dark approach means that the resources are compiled and switched at runtime. This means Hot Reload doesn’t work as the XAML doesn’t have a direct “live” link to the app. This just means you have to get it all looking nice with the XAML as part of the app or page and then copy it to the light/dark ResourceDictionary when you have finished. You might also want to separate out and DataTemplates into another ResourceDictionary that uses the other two.

I also found that this process didn’t work for the Shell objects themselves. by that I mean the UI that presents itself when the app starts up. Navigation bars and Tab bars, but not modal pages. In these cases I defined the Shell colours like this.

<Shell xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms"
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml"
        xmlns:views="clr-namespace:GalleryApp.Views"
        BackgroundColor="{AppThemeBinding Light=SteelBlue, Dark=Black}"
        ForegroundColor="{AppThemeBinding Light=White, Dark=White}"
        TitleColor="{AppThemeBinding Light=White, Dark=White}"
        DisabledColor="{AppThemeBinding Light=Green, Dark=Green}"
        UnselectedColor="{AppThemeBinding Light=LightGray, Dark=DarkGray}"
        FlyoutBackgroundColor="{AppThemeBinding Light=White, Dark={OnPlatform Gray, iOS=Gray, Android=LightGray, UWP=Gray}}"
        x:Class="GalleryApp.AppShell">

While in the content pages definitions it was used as

<Style TargetType="NavigationPage">
    <Setter Property="BarBackgroundColor" Value="{StaticResource NavigationPrimary}" />
    <Setter Property="BarTextColor" Value="White" />
    <Setter Property="BackgroundColor" Value="{StaticResource BackgroundColor}" />
</Style>

Also occasionally I needed a DynamicResource instead of a static one. Half a template would update and half wouldn’t. Also it pays to check ALL of your screens work.

Splash Screens

These aren’t essential but are nice to have. Especially if your existing splash screen is light and bright. For this I mainly used this blog post as a reference. It explains everything you need to know , but as I had done a splashscreen before this was fairly familiar. The only thing I had trouble with was editing the iOS storyboard. I ended up adding the ViewController in XCode rather than in Visual Studio.

Categories
Uncategorized

Build Discrepancies

I have just released version 1.0.2 of OpenSeaGallery. If you looked you will see the Android version was out about a week before the iOS one. I has them both set up in The AppCentre and when I tried pushing the new versions, iOS gave me some fairly serious errors.

Now you have to upload the first version into the Apple app store via the visual studio uploader. It only really handles updates and not initial releases. I had updated a few nugets and stuff like that but the app store sent me an automated email stating I was using some private APIs and UIWebView was depreciated. None of my changes were that drastic and the first version had gone through fine. I swapped out the Chromecast library for a better one and updated all the nugets again. I re-submitted it about ten times and it still came back with that error.

Then I thought, visual studio uploaded the first version fine, so what about the second? I fiddled about with my profiles and certificates and what do you know? Version two uploaded fine. It is now available on the store. This means there is something about my project that causes the AppCentre to build it differently to visual studio.

Where do you start? I guess it must be something in the project file or the references that is causing the issue. I tried googling it and making changes like this but to no avail. I think my only option is to rebuild the iOS project file again from scratch, comparing it with projects I know that do work.