Now that I had profile pictures for users I wanted to display them when you tapped on a pin. I thought this would be easy to do but there was no options provided with pins to display pictures. After doing some research I found out that in order to customize pins you had to render them differently on different devices. Meaning you had to write separate code for iOS and Android.

What you needed to do is write a CustomRendering class in both the Android code and iOS code that extended the MapRenderer class. The MapRenderer class is called every time the Map is changed letting you manipulate how the map, but more importantly how the pins, are presented. On Android you can customize the View that is presented when tapping on a pin and have it display the users profile picture. On iOS the view presented is cut into three parts the LeftCalloutAccessoryView, the middle view, and the RightCalloutAccessoryView. I used the left accessory view to show the profile picture and the middle to show the title of the pin.

All of this was of course not done without any problems. At this point in time a lot things that were working in the past started to break. Mainly the Geolocator plugin, which meant I couldn’t get locations anymore. Most of my time was spent trying to fix this. I fixed it eventually by downgrading the plugin to a lower version and manually reinstalling the dependencies again.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that I had profile pictures for users I wanted to display them when you tapped on a pin. I thought this would be easy to do but there was no options provided with pins to display pictures. After doing some research I found out that in order to customize pins you had to render them differently on different devices. Meaning you had to write separate code for iOS and Android.

What you needed to do is write a CustomRendering class in both the Android code and iOS code that extended the MapRenderer class. The MapRenderer class is called every time the Map is changed letting you manipulate how the map, but more importantly how the pins, are presented. On Android you can customize the View that is presented when tapping on a pin and have it display the users profile picture. On iOS the view presented is cut into three parts the LeftCalloutAccessoryView, the middle view, and the RightCalloutAccessoryView. I used the left accessory view to show the profile picture and the middle to show the title of the pin.

All of this was of course not done without any problems. At this point in time a lot things that were working in the past started to break. Mainly the Geolocator plugin, which meant I couldn’t get locations anymore. Most of my time was spent trying to fix this. I fixed it eventually by downgrading the plugin to a lower version and manually reinstalling the dependencies again.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that I had profile pictures for users I wanted to display them when you tapped on a pin. I thought this would be easy to do but there was no options provided with pins to display pictures. After doing some research I found out that in order to customize pins you had to render them differently on different devices. Meaning you had to write separate code for iOS and Android.

What you needed to do is write a CustomRendering class in both the Android code and iOS code that extended the MapRenderer class. The MapRenderer class is called every time the Map is changed letting you manipulate how the map, but more importantly how the pins, are presented. On Android you can customize the View that is presented when tapping on a pin and have it display the users profile picture. On iOS the view presented is cut into three parts the LeftCalloutAccessoryView, the middle view, and the RightCalloutAccessoryView. I used the left accessory view to show the profile picture and the middle to show the title of the pin.

All of this was of course not done without any problems. At this point in time a lot things that were working in the past started to break. Mainly the Geolocator plugin, which meant I couldn’t get locations anymore. Most of my time was spent trying to fix this. I fixed it eventually by downgrading the plugin to a lower version and manually reinstalling the dependencies again.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that I had profile pictures for users I wanted to display them when you tapped on a pin. I thought this would be easy to do but there was no options provided with pins to display pictures. After doing some research I found out that in order to customize pins you had to render them differently on different devices. Meaning you had to write separate code for iOS and Android.

What you needed to do is write a CustomRendering class in both the Android code and iOS code that extended the MapRenderer class. The MapRenderer class is called every time the Map is changed letting you manipulate how the map, but more importantly how the pins, are presented. On Android you can customize the View that is presented when tapping on a pin and have it display the users profile picture. On iOS the view presented is cut into three parts the LeftCalloutAccessoryView, the middle view, and the RightCalloutAccessoryView. I used the left accessory view to show the profile picture and the middle to show the title of the pin.

All of this was of course not done without any problems. At this point in time a lot things that were working in the past started to break. Mainly the Geolocator plugin, which meant I couldn’t get locations anymore. Most of my time was spent trying to fix this. I fixed it eventually by downgrading the plugin to a lower version and manually reinstalling the dependencies again.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that the user system was up I could add in profile pictures. For this I added a profile page which would hold the profile picture, buttons to let you upload a new picture, and a button to go to the map. The first step was letting the user pick the picture they wanted to use from the picture gallery on their phone. For this I used the Xam.Plugin.Media plugin which provides that functionality for Android and iOS. Next I added a new Table to the sql server which would store a persons username and their profile picture in a BLOB. BLOB stands for binary large object and is used to store large chunks of data. So the way it would work is a user would tap the upload picture button select a picture using the Media plugin that would then give us the picture converted into a byte array. The data in the array and the users username would then be stored in the sql server.

Next I had to take care of how someone would look like without a profile picture. I didn’t want to store a picture on the server for every person that didn’t have a profile picture so I found a “no avatar” picture and stored it in the resource folder on both iOS and Android. So when somebody that hadn’t uploaded a profile picture posted their location or went to their profile page the “no avatar” would be loaded from resources.

The final problem to take care of was having a uniform size for the profile pictures. For this I needed to be able to resize the pictures before storing them in the database. I tried using a plugin for it but the plugin would always maintain the aspect ratio of image meaning I would always get images with varying sizes. So instead I decided to code my own image resizer. The way this works is you write an interface in the shared code and then write two classes that extend it, one in the Android code and one in the iOS. Then when calling a method from the class you use Xamarins DependencyService which selects the correct class for you depending on what system its running on. So using this I wrote my own ImageResizer class that took an image byte array and resized it to whatever size I needed.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that the user system was up I could add in profile pictures. For this I added a profile page which would hold the profile picture, buttons to let you upload a new picture, and a button to go to the map. The first step was letting the user pick the picture they wanted to use from the picture gallery on their phone. For this I used the Xam.Plugin.Media plugin which provides that functionality for Android and iOS. Next I added a new Table to the sql server which would store a persons username and their profile picture in a BLOB. BLOB stands for binary large object and is used to store large chunks of data. So the way it would work is a user would tap the upload picture button select a picture using the Media plugin that would then give us the picture converted into a byte array. The data in the array and the users username would then be stored in the sql server.

Next I had to take care of how someone would look like without a profile picture. I didn’t want to store a picture on the server for every person that didn’t have a profile picture so I found a “no avatar” picture and stored it in the resource folder on both iOS and Android. So when somebody that hadn’t uploaded a profile picture posted their location or went to their profile page the “no avatar” would be loaded from resources.

The final problem to take care of was having a uniform size for the profile pictures. For this I needed to be able to resize the pictures before storing them in the database. I tried using a plugin for it but the plugin would always maintain the aspect ratio of image meaning I would always get images with varying sizes. So instead I decided to code my own image resizer. The way this works is you write an interface in the shared code and then write two classes that extend it, one in the Android code and one in the iOS. Then when calling a method from the class you use Xamarins DependencyService which selects the correct class for you depending on what system its running on. So using this I wrote my own ImageResizer class that took an image byte array and resized it to whatever size I needed.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that the user system was up I could add in profile pictures. For this I added a profile page which would hold the profile picture, buttons to let you upload a new picture, and a button to go to the map. The first step was letting the user pick the picture they wanted to use from the picture gallery on their phone. For this I used the Xam.Plugin.Media plugin which provides that functionality for Android and iOS. Next I added a new Table to the sql server which would store a persons username and their profile picture in a BLOB. BLOB stands for binary large object and is used to store large chunks of data. So the way it would work is a user would tap the upload picture button select a picture using the Media plugin that would then give us the picture converted into a byte array. The data in the array and the users username would then be stored in the sql server.

Next I had to take care of how someone would look like without a profile picture. I didn’t want to store a picture on the server for every person that didn’t have a profile picture so I found a “no avatar” picture and stored it in the resource folder on both iOS and Android. So when somebody that hadn’t uploaded a profile picture posted their location or went to their profile page the “no avatar” would be loaded from resources.

The final problem to take care of was having a uniform size for the profile pictures. For this I needed to be able to resize the pictures before storing them in the database. I tried using a plugin for it but the plugin would always maintain the aspect ratio of image meaning I would always get images with varying sizes. So instead I decided to code my own image resizer. The way this works is you write an interface in the shared code and then write two classes that extend it, one in the Android code and one in the iOS. Then when calling a method from the class you use Xamarins DependencyService which selects the correct class for you depending on what system its running on. So using this I wrote my own ImageResizer class that took an image byte array and resized it to whatever size I needed.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that the user system was up I could add in profile pictures. For this I added a profile page which would hold the profile picture, buttons to let you upload a new picture, and a button to go to the map. The first step was letting the user pick the picture they wanted to use from the picture gallery on their phone. For this I used the Xam.Plugin.Media plugin which provides that functionality for Android and iOS. Next I added a new Table to the sql server which would store a persons username and their profile picture in a BLOB. BLOB stands for binary large object and is used to store large chunks of data. So the way it would work is a user would tap the upload picture button select a picture using the Media plugin that would then give us the picture converted into a byte array. The data in the array and the users username would then be stored in the sql server.

Next I had to take care of how someone would look like without a profile picture. I didn’t want to store a picture on the server for every person that didn’t have a profile picture so I found a “no avatar” picture and stored it in the resource folder on both iOS and Android. So when somebody that hadn’t uploaded a profile picture posted their location or went to their profile page the “no avatar” would be loaded from resources.

The final problem to take care of was having a uniform size for the profile pictures. For this I needed to be able to resize the pictures before storing them in the database. I tried using a plugin for it but the plugin would always maintain the aspect ratio of image meaning I would always get images with varying sizes. So instead I decided to code my own image resizer. The way this works is you write an interface in the shared code and then write two classes that extend it, one in the Android code and one in the iOS. Then when calling a method from the class you use Xamarins DependencyService which selects the correct class for you depending on what system its running on. So using this I wrote my own ImageResizer class that took an image byte array and resized it to whatever size I needed.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that the user system was up I could add in profile pictures. For this I added a profile page which would hold the profile picture, buttons to let you upload a new picture, and a button to go to the map. The first step was letting the user pick the picture they wanted to use from the picture gallery on their phone. For this I used the Xam.Plugin.Media plugin which provides that functionality for Android and iOS. Next I added a new Table to the sql server which would store a persons username and their profile picture in a BLOB. BLOB stands for binary large object and is used to store large chunks of data. So the way it would work is a user would tap the upload picture button select a picture using the Media plugin that would then give us the picture converted into a byte array. The data in the array and the users username would then be stored in the sql server.

Next I had to take care of how someone would look like without a profile picture. I didn’t want to store a picture on the server for every person that didn’t have a profile picture so I found a “no avatar” picture and stored it in the resource folder on both iOS and Android. So when somebody that hadn’t uploaded a profile picture posted their location or went to their profile page the “no avatar” would be loaded from resources.

The final problem to take care of was having a uniform size for the profile pictures. For this I needed to be able to resize the pictures before storing them in the database. I tried using a plugin for it but the plugin would always maintain the aspect ratio of image meaning I would always get images with varying sizes. So instead I decided to code my own image resizer. The way this works is you write an interface in the shared code and then write two classes that extend it, one in the Android code and one in the iOS. Then when calling a method from the class you use Xamarins DependencyService which selects the correct class for you depending on what system its running on. So using this I wrote my own ImageResizer class that took an image byte array and resized it to whatever size I needed.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that the user system was up I could add in profile pictures. For this I added a profile page which would hold the profile picture, buttons to let you upload a new picture, and a button to go to the map. The first step was letting the user pick the picture they wanted to use from the picture gallery on their phone. For this I used the Xam.Plugin.Media plugin which provides that functionality for Android and iOS. Next I added a new Table to the sql server which would store a persons username and their profile picture in a BLOB. BLOB stands for binary large object and is used to store large chunks of data. So the way it would work is a user would tap the upload picture button select a picture using the Media plugin that would then give us the picture converted into a byte array. The data in the array and the users username would then be stored in the sql server.

Next I had to take care of how someone would look like without a profile picture. I didn’t want to store a picture on the server for every person that didn’t have a profile picture so I found a “no avatar” picture and stored it in the resource folder on both iOS and Android. So when somebody that hadn’t uploaded a profile picture posted their location or went to their profile page the “no avatar” would be loaded from resources.

The final problem to take care of was having a uniform size for the profile pictures. For this I needed to be able to resize the pictures before storing them in the database. I tried using a plugin for it but the plugin would always maintain the aspect ratio of image meaning I would always get images with varying sizes. So instead I decided to code my own image resizer. The way this works is you write an interface in the shared code and then write two classes that extend it, one in the Android code and one in the iOS. Then when calling a method from the class you use Xamarins DependencyService which selects the correct class for you depending on what system its running on. So using this I wrote my own ImageResizer class that took an image byte array and resized it to whatever size I needed.

From the blog Location App Blog by Anonymous and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.