Programming

With my LifeCounter app for Magic The Gathering, I released my first Android app on the Google PlayStore over two years ago. Besides my first release, this was also another milestone for me: My first real app. Over two years later, I am proud to announce a completely revamped version of the app. Several complete revisions have taken place in the meantime and I’m already planning the next one, as I admittedly tried to learn the MVP pattern with the app and now, a few months later, I’m completely dissatisfied and want to switch to MVVM. But that doesn’t really matter at the moment. ...

Today I want to show you how to use a 360° panorama picture as a skybox for Unity. As you may know, skyboxes are usually created from 6 images (cubemaps), with each image representing one of the sides. However, 360° photos usually use a so-called “Equirectangular” format, which looks something like this: So in order to be able to use such an image in Unity, the idea of creating a cubemap from a 360° photo is obvious. But there is an easier way, which I would like to show you now: Cubemap: I start with my image, which I import into Unity. Then I select it and change the Texture Shape property from 2D to Cube. I then save the changes by hitting Apply and then create a new material. I change the shader from default to Skybox - Cubemap and specify the image I want to use. ...

Today I would like to give you an overview of how the garbage collector of the .NET framework works. Knowledge of it makes a lot of sense to improve your programming skills regarding object creation and lifetime. Garbage Collection in General I want to start with some general theory - what is garbage collection and what do I need it for? Garbage collection (GC) is basically a feature that relieves developers of the work of allocating and deallocating memory for their objects. ...

If you already have a little experience in cross-platform development with Xamarin.Forms, you probably know the problem: Navigation between different pages works very well, but there is no easy solution to display dialog boxes overlaying an active page. Today I want to show you how you can implement this feature in your Xamarin.Forms application. I have created an example project for this purpose, which you can download from my GitHub site. ...

You are aware of JavaScript, but have never really made friends with the language? Today I would like to show you a first insight into the JS-SuperSet TypeScript, so perhaps you can give JavaScript a second chance. TypeScript is a SuperSet of JavaScript. SuperSet means that all functionalities of JS are both supported and extended. As the name suggests, the main feature of TypeScript are strongly typed variables. But more on this in a moment. ...