Building a Phone Dialler for Families and Friends using Xamarin – Part 2

Hello, people, I am back to talk more into the developments of my App. I am trying to name the App as Family Dialler. In case you have any better name, please do reach out or comment below. If any of you are a designer, please do help me with the look and feel of this App.

Family Dialler

Well, the App is now working to some extent in Debugging Mode. I am first working on a skeleton of the App with the minimum designs and layouts. I am doing this to test the functionalities that are required to go further with the App requirements.

NuGet Packages

I am listing some of the NuGet packages that I have come across and using them or am thinking of using in the future (as the App progresses). I have been maintaining a list of these packages and will keep on updating the same in a post published earlier.

I can access the Contacts as we speak and can perform the basic CRUD operations on my favorite contacts. Looking forward to finishing some more things 🙂

Building a Phone Dialler for Families and Friends using Xamarin – Part 1

The idea was to create a Phone Dialler where I can mark my folks (friends and families) as Favorites. You might think that we already have similar functionality available in our current Dialer, so why re-invent the wheel.

However, the way I want to do is that we have a different kind of implementation and that the dialer is something that intrigues me. So let’s see how far I can go into.

Now, in order to achieve this, obviously I will use my favorite IDE i.e., Visual Studio and the technology would be Xamarin.

The Basic Functionality

Let’s try to examine the blocks involved in this kind of App and the basic requirements in order to achieve this. Definitely, we can have other services that can be attached to it at a later point in time but then let’s keep the options to a basic minimum for now.
For the App to work, I would need to access the Phone Contacts as well as Call Logs. The App should have existing Contacts accessed from the Device, Call Logs to access the History, as well as an SQLite DB to maintain the favorites. Let’s not forget the Dialer Pad for dialing numbers directly.

  • Permissions:
    • Access Phone Contacts (Read and Write)
    • Access Call Logs (Read and Write)

To build the UI, we can always make use of ListViews, MasterDetail Pages, etc., to render the desired UI. I will definitely make use of the NuGet packages to get some faster results.

I have already started pushing in my code to GitHub. Once the Code is ready in terms of basic functionality, I will make it public, but for now, let’s hang onto it.

ContentResolver for Xamarin.Forms

We often face some challenges when working with Xamarin.Forms.
In a similar instance, I faced one when trying to read Contacts. I found myself in a fix because the data that I had received for an Image was basically a URI with type content://

The data retrieved from the Contact for a Thumbnail was something like this:
content://com.android.contacts/contacts/29059/photo

Obviously, Xamarin.Forms is fully equipped to deal with any sort of ImageSource that comes in its ways, except something that is directly a platform specific.

In order to render this, I went ahead with DependencyServices.
Here’s my implementation for this:

IContentImageService.cs
public interface IContentImageService
{
    Stream GetImageUri(string contentUri);
}
ContentResolverMethods.cs
[assembly: Xamarin.Forms.Dependency(typeof(ContentResolverMethods))]
namespace YourNamespace.Droid.Dependencies
{
    public class ContentResolverMethods : IContentImageService
    {
        public Stream GetImageUri(string contentUri)
        {
            var uri = Android.Net.Uri.Parse(contentUri);
            return Android.App.Application.Context.ContentResolver.OpenInputStream(uri);
        }
    }
}

Now in order to use this, you can always invoke the method implemented in Android using DependencyServices from within the Xamarin.Forms Project which is either a .NetStandard, Shared or a PCL based project

var stream = DependencyService.Get<IContentImageService>().GetImageUri(imageUri);
return ImageSource.FromStream(() => stream);

Happy Coding!

Speech To Text in Android using Xamarin

On this fine day of Teacher’s Day, my mentor from Aditi asked me if I know any samples on creating a simple app for Speech to Text recognition in Android. I searched on the net but did not find much result. So then I thought, why not I create a sample, push it in Git and send him the link.

So after an hour the sample was done and pushed to Git. Xamarin allows the use of Android APIs to be utilized in a very easy way.

In just few lines of code I was able to use the RecognizerIntent to launch an activity that will prompt the user for speech and send it through a speech recognizer. The results will be returned via activity results in the event handler OnActivityResult.

The sample can be downloaded and used as is from here.