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Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android Support coming soon!

Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android Support coming soon!

We’ve been talking about it for a while, but SciChart for Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS are nearly here!

We are hoping to be releasing a BETA of these two control libraries at the end of the year. These will be a binding library (wrapper) around our existing iOS Charts & Android Chart controls, so you will soon be able to build applications either natively using XCode or Android Studio, or using Microsoft tools (Visual Studio, Xamarin Studio, and Visual Studio for Mac).

Read more about our mobile strategy, plus what the future holds for SciChart below:

Why Xamarin?

SciChart Android running inside Xamarin Studio on a Mac
SciChart Android running inside Xamarin Studio + Android Emulator on a Mac

At SciChart we made the strategic decision in January 2015 to begin to port to mobile platforms iOS & Android, because we felt that our fast, high-performance WPF charting controls were a natural fit for mobile devices where performance is required in real-time scientific or financial charting apps. It has been a long journey, but in July of 2016 we released SciChart iOS & SciChart Android v1. Since then we have released a number of minor updates, and our mobile chart controls are already being used by a number of companies to create some amazing applications with incredible performance.

However, from the first moment we announced SciChart for iOS / Android in 2015 we have had requests for Xamarin. We were reluctant at first because of the pricing of Xamarin in 2015, however, Microsoft has since acquired Xamarin and made it free to all, so there is no longer a cost barrier to use this incredible technology for developing mobile apps. As a result, we have accelerated our mobile development and Xamarin binding libraries so that we could bring SciChart to mobile as well as desktop platforms using Microsoft tooling.

Microsoft is Betting on Xamarin

SciChart iOS Running inside Xamarin Studio on OSX
SciChart iOS Running inside Xamarin Studio+ iOS Emulator on OSX

Since we started working with Xamarin in April 2016, we have seen a huge amount of change in these toolsets. Microsoft is working hard to update the platforms, staying current with the latest XCode version, the latest Android SDKs and fixing bugs. We have seen so much change that we actually had to re-write our binding libraries once just to cater for them!

What we see is Microsoft is confident in the future success of Xamarin, are working very actively on it, so we are as well. We are committed to invest in this platform. What’s more, it ties in with what we already do: we already make a very successful 2D & 3D chart control on WPF.

Our Strategy in 2016-2017

SciChart Android running in VS2015 with Xamarin.Android on Windows
SciChart Android running in VS2015 with Xamarin.Android and the Android Emulator on Windows

We intend to BETA our 2D Chart Control libraries for Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS at the end of the year, with a full release in Q1 of 2017. Our offering will include 2D Charts, and we intend to port over everything that we’re doing in WPF to the Xamarin as well as native iOS/Android platforms.

We intend to port over 3D Charts to mobile. Our WPF 3D Charting engine is mostly written in C++, and we deliberately made it cross platform so it will work on iOS & Android.

We intend to make our iOS components available for Mac Desktop (OSX) use. The change between Objective-C on iOS & Mac Desktop is minimal, so we can get an extra platform with much of the code reused. Also Xamarin.Mac allows development for Mac desktop. Bonus!

We also intend to continue to expand our WPF team – our WPF business is actually growing – not shrinking as the pundits will have you think. We continue to see a lot of life in this platform, which is if we’re honest, our first love in programming 🙂

Watch this space

If you want to hear more about what we’re doing, sign up to one of our newsletters. You can do this by going to a landing page (for any platform) and giving us your name and email. Any of them will work, such as this one on iOS:

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER

When we release you will be notified. In the meantime, if you have any feedback, or want to discuss our mobile roadmap, please get in touch!

Best regards,
[SciChart Team]

 

By Andrew Burnett-Thompson | Dec 02, 2016
CEO / Founder of SciChart. Masters (MEng) and PhD in Electronics & Signal Processing.Follow me on LinkedIn for more SciChart content, or twitter at @drandrewbt.

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