JamesMontemagno

Nice! I went back and forth on the different Sunny bikes to be honest. My biggest issue so far with Fitness+ is that it doesn't sync up with the cadence sensor as I wrote about. If you have an Apple TV then that is ideal as you can use your phone for the cadence. I really like the Apple Watch integration, i have a video on the blog. I am enjoying the 1 month trial and hope they improve it.

Whoa! This is awesome!!! I know what I am doing for my holiday hack :) Added it into my post!

That is a good point as well. My wife also uses the bike and this is a big benefit.

Yeah, I don't consider my post a hack or constructing the bike from scratch at all. That would be super impressive IMHO. I just did a bunch of research, found the lowest minimal requirements in what I was looking for in a spin bike and wrote about it :)

I sort of consider it two different types of workouts. Trainers for sure are great if you are comfortable putting it on and off. For me this was an at home spin bike with a nice heavy flywheel for resistance. You can totally accomplish a lot of it with a trainer, but they can range in price, sometimes much more than just a indoor cycling bike like I put together.

You also put additional miles on your bike with a trainer. Kind of depends on what you are looking for. Totally viable.

I guess I consider it DIY as it is combining the Bike, Tablet, and Sensor together instead of buying an all in 1 package that restricts you to a specific service.

Good question! I have in the past put a trainer on my road bike. They are a bit pricey for decent ones and when I tried them in the past I just really didn't like it as much. I also didn't like putting on and off trainer.

That said I really bought this setup as a spin bike for spin classes. Which to me I don't want to put stress on my road bike and I want that resistance in the fly wheel.

Hey there! Yeah, that is a good point for sure. I would say though that while I already owned the tablet it would also work just fine with any smart phone. That is a good cost and could be considered.

If you are building for Android you can do it 100% of on Mac OR a PC. Since Google ships sdks and tools for both Mac or PC that is why you can do this.

Apple is much trickier. You can still open iOS projects, modify code, and compile without a Mac connected. However, to actually do design in the storyboard designer in VS or build the package to deploy on a simulator or device you need to be connected to a Mac somewhere on your network. This is apple restrictions and also for the fact that all of the simulators and tooling only exists on the Mac.

You don't have to have a power house machine to do this though, something like a Mac Mini would work fine. There are some cloud solutions out there as well.

The approach with Xamarin is that you are able to build out a shared C#/.NET business logic layer. All of your platform independent code such as Models, ViewModels, Database code, Restful Service calls, etc. You get to use the power of C# and .NET to build this out. Then you build out user interfaces for iOS, Android, and Windows and tie this logic all together. Xamarin apps are native so you follow the same paradigms for building the UIs out such as Android XML and iOS Storyboard or XIB files, but you can build these out in the Xamarin Designers for both iOS and Android inside of Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio.

On the code behind side of iOS/Android (UIViewController or Activity) you write all of this in C# with C# features like LINQ, events, delegates, etc. and you have access to 100% of the iOS and Android APIs of the platform as well.

Now we do have the Xamarin.Forms library which adds on top of this to build on a shared UI layer for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone as well. However it is not for every app and we have guidance at www.xamarin.com/forms. Hopefully this is a nice overview of the platform.

Hey there, I am James Montemagno a developer evangelist at Xamarin. I have been developing native apps with Xamarin for nearly 4 years now across iOS, Android, and of course Windows (I was a customer for 2 years before joining Xamarin). I just wanted to clarify a bit about Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. It is important to know that Xamarin.Forms is a cross platform UI layer that sits on top of the core Xamarin platform. Using native Xamarin you are still sharing your backend C#/.NET code and then building out native user interfaces for each platform.

The Xamarin.Forms library adds an abstraction over common controls available on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Xamarin.Forms is extremely extensible, but it is not for every app, especially if you need a lot of custom UI or API access. For data entry, proofs-of-concept, or other simple apps it is great and we have a guide to help you select: http://cdn1.xamarin.com/Architecture%20Selector.pdf. The nice thing here is that either approach can use a shared-code backend.

I think I can address some of your concerns below:

1.) I would love to know which components you were having issues with and I can work with the team. There are a lot of settings in Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio as far as when to break on exceptions so I would love to help out here.

2.) If you are exclusive to using Xamarin.Forms then yes you will have a limited set of controls, since Xamarin.Forms is a subset of common controls. It is extensible via “CustomRenderers”, but that require some work and if you need a lot of them then it might be worth looking into the native approach without Xamarin.Forms as this approach will automatically give you access to every control on each platform you are creating.

3.) We are always looking to expand our documentation across all of our products and highly recommend checking out our updated developer portal: http://developer.xamarin.com there is a plethora of Xamarin.Forms related documentation as well as http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-f... It is pretty extensive, but if there is something missing please please please let us know and we will work with the documentation team to add it. In addition to this documentation we do have a book that has been written by Charles Petzold on Xamarin.Forms that is freely available: http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-f...

4.) For XAML intellisense it is built right into Xamarin Studio, for Visual Studio there is an extension that you can install: http://www.cazzulino.com/mobileessentials.html This will be integrated automatically in the future. I apologize that this is tricky to find.

Hopefully this helps out a bit with some of the issues that you have run into, but again please please feel free to email me with any questions, encounter any problems please reach out to us so we know and can fix them. You have my direct line: [email protected].