The native mobile app is a simple way of recording crew member’s Hours of Rest, as defined by the Maritime Labour Convention. Handling all the rules for correct work and rest hours and providing intuitive and easy to understand alerts and notifications to help the crew to quickly and easily enter and submit their weekly hours for approval.
Xamarin enables building fully native apps across iOS, Android and Windows using a shared C# codebase and using the same IDE (our Visual Studio development environment) as we use for the rest of our programming. More specifically we've used Xamarin.Forms, which enables us to share both business logic and presentation layer code, which gets converted into Xcode for iOS and Java for Android automatically as part of the build process.
The result of this approach is that we can build fully native apps with none of the shortcomings of the likes of PhoneGap where we can use the programming language we know and love (C#) and handle exactly the functionality, look and feel that we want for the application.
Impact
- In the process of being rolled out to both Sealogical and Y.CO crew
- Expected to help draw new clients to Sealogical yacht management system
- Should help crew significantly with logging their hours of rest
MVVM design pattern
Using the MVVM approach made it easier to program and maintain the code with a good separation of concerns.
“I LOVE this. Some really clever touches, I think this is really going to work well. I will now want to make changes to the desktop version of the HOR section, for sure!”
Peel Taggart, Sealogical Co-Founder
Gesture Recognition
The most dominant gesture is tap but we have also programmed for swipe gestures to 'swipe' between weeks on the individual day view.
