So as I make apps for people with disabilities and my biggest user base at this time are people with intellectual disabilities in Belgium means that an accessible and easy to digest UI is really important on Android phones. Most of the people in this category live on a fee and an iPhone is most of the times too expensive. But I have an iPhone thanks to a beautiful sponsorship for our nonprofit from Rotary. So testing my UI was in the past pretty difficult. Android emulators are mostly pretty slow, even on a quite good laptop. So the time it takes to stop debugging, do some UI changes and rebuild and reload on the emulator can take some time. Do we want this?
I was choked from the 🔥🔄 announcement at the Xamarin Dev Summit. I wasn’t there in person but as a good Microsoft fan, I watch pretty much every live stream. Thanks to Maddy Leger I had the opportunity to go into the early access preview and in 1 week time, Hot Reload changed my life!
Adjusting little tweaks in UI, adjusting bigger UI changes, it’s all in the speed of light. It’s pretty fast!
I can write hours about this, but maybe a video about me playing with 🔥🔄 will show you how easy you make an accessible UI:
What I am doing in this recording:
-I add text to the Emoji’s
-I change the text color
-I change the background color.
Here you have before and after:
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So in less than 3 minutes, I made my application more accessible. Is this the end of this application? NO! It’s just a play around in 5 minutes. Before this recording, I’d played already with 🔥🔄 and I experimented with changing form a stack panel to a grid, and I played even with Shell and Visual! Hot Reload works pretty fast and fluid!
Accessible Dreams 