Data Visualization

In the next release, we will continue to complete our cross-platform data visualization roadmap which includes:

• Gauge
  
  • Create beautiful dashboards with gauge component.
  • Modern gauge design featuring smooth color blending mode across regions.
  • Smooth animation supporting both initial and value change.
  • Customizable start and end angle.
  • Fully customizable appearance settings, including pointer shape, regs.
• Circular Gauge
  • Modern circular gauge control with smooth animation.
  • Customizable start and end angle.
  • Customizable gauge size, border appearance, background and active value color.

Signature Pad

A highly versatile signature pad control with built-in MVVM and data binding support.

Key features include:

• Available for iOS and Android.
• Customizable appearance, including border, fonts, caption, clear button, and other visual elements.
• Produce raw image result which can be bound to a property in ViewModel.

Crosslight Project Wizard for Mac OS

Finally, the highly popular Crosslight Project Wizard is now coming to the Mac. The Project Wizard for Mac lets you quickly create a new Crosslight solution directly from Mac OS, from either the stand alone app, or through Xamarin Studio.

Key features include:

• Native Mac OS user experience
• Choose from dozens of available project templates
• Customizable themes and options

Form Builder

Form Builder has been one of the most powerful features in Crosslight which lets you easily create rich data forms with developer-friendly attribute metadata. In the next release, we see numerous room for improvements that we can do to make Form Builder even more powerful.

In the upcoming release, we are planning to add a host of new, highly-anticipated features that will further simplify form building.

• Dynamic sections – an advanced feature that lets you quickly create highly dynamic forms.
• Platform-specific UI metadata – this new feature will allow you to intuitively customize platform-specific appearance settings which aren't available in the core (shared) form metadata.
• Visibility binding support for Section.
• Introducing a new Dock layout – perfect for adding a sticky header or footer such as image or carousel.
• New built-in editors:
  • Image View – support loading image from local storage as well as remote source.
  • Segmented Button – a convenient selection control.
  • Grid View – a gorgeous list view control that presents items in intuitive manner, perfect for e-commerce and B2C apps.
• New extension editors:
  • Map View
  • Carousel View
  • Calendar View

Services

Cross-platform services let you easily access native platform and hardware specific functions from the shared project. We are planning to add a few more services in the upcoming release:

• Screen Capture service.
• Contact service.
• Passcode service – with TouchID support on iOS.
• Video streaming service.
• Audio streaming service.

New Crosslight Platforms

Crosslight was built from the ground-up for ultimate scalability with future-proof design. It currently supports four platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, and Windows 8. During the year 2015, we are looking to add 2 more platforms to join the Crosslight family which includes:

• Mac OS X Lion – building on Xamarin.Mac
• Windows 10 – building on new Windows 10 SDK

As the result, you can easily add support for the upcoming new platforms largely based on the Crosslight apps you've built today.

Platform-specific Improvements

Android:

• New location service based on Google Play Library v13.
• Binding support for Grid View with grouping capability.
• Activity indicator redesign
• New Lollipop "Material" design support, including binding adapter for these key components:
  • Recycler View
  • Card View
  • Parallax View
  • Toolbar – replacing ActionBar
  • Better support for animation
    • Touch feedback
    • Circular Reveal
    • Activity transitions
    • Curved motion
    • View state changes
  • Customize activity transitions
    • Explode
    • Slide
    • Fade
    • Custom

iOS:

• Advanced iOS 8 specific components/features:
  • Access to TouchID through service.
  • Redesigned UIMasterDetailController to support the new universal layout, including display button item mode (for iPhone 6+), collapsed detail view, and more.
  • Custom navigation transitions including combination of both 2D and 3D animations.

WebSocket

Easily establish WebSocket connection right from the ViewModel (shared) project. This new data component will open up exciting new possibilities in Crosslight-powered apps. The planned key features include:

• Client implementation
• Server implementation
• Integration in App Framework

Performance Improvements

As we have more Crosslight apps developed and submitted to both App Store and Play Store, you can expect improved reliability and performance in the next release. We are striving to continuously evaluate and fine tune the overall user experience of the final submitted apps, including the use of optimized animation, multi-tasking and platform-specific threading capability.

Delivered in Crosslight 4 Release

On July 2015, Crosslight 4 was released with more than 12.000 new API, deliver nearly 60% of the features defined in the 2015 roadmap. Exceeding expectation, the release also includes many exciting new features not defined in the roadmap which we believe are important to be included in the milestone. The following list shows the completed features in Crosslight 4.

Data Framework

The data framework in Crosslight is one of the most important components for building any scale of business apps. We will take our data component to the next level by supporting more complex and advanced scenarios commonly found in larger enterprise apps.

• Entity Container supports more advanced database structure.
  • Multiple foreign key reference, including support for self-reference.
  • Many to many relationship without payload.
• Entity Container performance improvement for entity relationship management.
• New features for RestClient:
  • Compression support through extensible filters.
  • Encryption support through extensible filters.
• Encryption support for SQLite.

Data Visualization

A business-oriented charting component with the following key features:

• Multiple Series
• Auto axis detection
• Legend
• Series
  • Bar / Column
  • Line
  • Area

Barcode Scanner

A versatile barcode scanner with real-time camera capture. Designed with simple and intuitive API accessible from the ViewModel, the scanner will support more than dozens of commonly used barcode format which include:

• AZTEC
• CODABAR
• DATA_MATRIX
• ITF 
• MAXICODE
• PDF_417
• QR_CODE
• RSS_14
• RSS_EXPANDED
• MSI
• PLESSEY
• Various CODE, EAN, and UPC formats.

Dialog Presenter

The presenters lineup in Crosslight have always been developer's most favorite feature which allows easy interaction with users, from presenting a simple message, asking for a choice, to showing activity indicator. In the next release, we will ship a new presenter, called Dialog Presenter, which lets you add custom input controls to the dialog in addition to default action buttons. It looks like similar to the screenshot below – taken from an app we built for our enterprise client.

The key features include:

• Load your own views as the dialog's content
• Capture results through ViewModel and data binding
• Customize positive and negative button caption
• Further customization on the button appearance in each platform

Enterprise App Framework

The Crosslight App Framework will be further improved to cover more advanced enterprise scenarios, particularly focusing on data sync improvements and new capabilities at architectural level. We aimed to create the most advanced and the most reliable data sync framework that enable fail-proof syncing capability which are often required in enterprise-grade apps. The upcoming sync framework will comprehensively handle real-world field scenarios such as weak connection, timeout, unresponsive server, concurrency, and many other cases that may cause the sync state to stall.

• Major Advancements in Synchronization Service.
  Introducing the new Sync Channel concept, this feature lets you define multiple sync channels instead of sync'ing a single large request. This feature is extremely important for building a scalable, highly-performing enterprise apps. Key features include:
  • Multiple sync channel definition with different priority, entity types and behaviors.
  • Max number of simultaneous syncing.
  • Paging support – allows large changes to be sync'ed without throttling bandwidth, perfect for apps usage in limited connection.
  • Smart queue management – just start the channel and the core sync service takes care the rest.
• Versatile Logging Framework.
  
  • Extensible logging infrastructure. Plug your own if desired.
  • Consistent design for client and server.
  • Built into core components of App Framework.
  • Integration with Aspect framework for streamlined API-level logging.

iOS Specific Features

• UIMultiPageController – present multiple views that uses segmented control as the tabbing, similar to the App Store experience. It will include full support for ViewModel based on multi-page design pattern.
• RoundedButton with built-in translucent visual effects, simulating native iOS 8 style circle buttons.
• Updated controls to support Xamarin iOS designer.
• Universal storyboard support.

To see the complete new features introduced in Crosslight 4, see Crosslight 4.0 Release Notes.

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