Xamarin.Tip – Add Easter Eggs on Shake

Here’s a quick and fun tip to add a little flare to your Xamarin applications whether in Xamarin.Forms or Xamarin Native! In a later post, we will also look at how to use the Shake Gesture to create useful tools for yourself as a developer, or for your users! This fun post is the foundation for the more serious stuff and will show you how to use the Shake Recognition to do just about anything you want.

In order to handle shake gestures natively, we have to write some Xamarin Native code, but we will assume you are using Xamarin.Forms. We’ll start with Android.

Android Shake Detection

Android is the more complicated between the two major platforms. The process is basically this:

• Listen to Accelerometer events
• Check value changes of the x, y, and z axis
• Compare deltas against a threshold to determine if motion is a shake
• Execute the fun stuff!

Let’s do this in the MainActivity since every Xamarin.Forms application needs at least that. If you are using Xamarin Native or a mix, then you may want to implement this elsewhere such as your Application class or abstracted with a shared BaseActvity or add it as a field to the Activities you want it in.

MainActivity.cs

/// <summary>
/// Main Activity and entry point for Xamarin.Forms
/// </summary>
public class MainActivity : Activity, Android.Hardware.ISensorEventListener
{
    #region Shake properties
    bool hasUpdated = false;
    DateTime lastUpdate;
    float lastX = 0.0f;
    float lastY = 0.0f;
    float lastZ = 0.0f;

    const int ShakeDetectionTimeLapse = 250;
    const double ShakeThreshold = 800;
    #endregion


    /// <summary>
    /// Sets up the internal lifecycle for registering views and the shake detection
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="savedInstanceState">Saved instance state.</param>
    protected override void OnCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
    {
        base.OnCreate(savedInstanceState);

        // all the other set up stuff here

        // shake management set up
        // Register this as a listener with the underlying service.
        var sensorManager = GetSystemService(SensorService) as Android.Hardware.SensorManager;
        var sensor = sensorManager.GetDefaultSensor(Android.Hardware.SensorType.Accelerometer);
        sensorManager.RegisterListener(this, sensor, Android.Hardware.SensorDelay.Game);

    }


    #region Android.Hardware.ISensorEventListener implementation

    /// <summary>
    /// Handles when the sensor range changes
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="sensor">Sensor.</param>
    /// <param name="accuracy">Accuracy.</param>
    public void OnAccuracyChanged(Android.Hardware.Sensor sensor, Android.Hardware.SensorStatus accuracy)
    {
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Detects sensor changes and is set up to listen for shakes.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="e">E.</param>
    public async void OnSensorChanged(Android.Hardware.SensorEvent e)
    {
        if (e.Sensor.Type == Android.Hardware.SensorType.Accelerometer)
        {
            var x = e.Values[0];
            var y = e.Values[1];
            var z = e.Values[2];

            // use to check against last time it was called so we don't register every delta
            var currentTime = DateTime.Now;
            if (hasUpdated == false)
            {
                hasUpdated = true;
                lastUpdate = currentTime;
                lastX = x;
                lastY = y;
                lastZ = z;
            }
            else
            {
                if ((currentTime - lastUpdate).TotalMilliseconds > ShakeDetectionTimeLapse)
                {
                    var diffTime = (float)(currentTime - lastUpdate).TotalMilliseconds;
                    lastUpdate = currentTime;
                    var total = x + y + z - lastX - lastY - lastZ;
                    var speed = Math.Abs(total) / diffTime * 10000;

                    if (speed > ShakeThreshold)
                    {
                        // We have a shake folks!
                        await EasterEggAsync();
                    }

                    lastX = x;
                    lastY = y;
                    lastZ = z;
                }
            }
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Execute the easter egg async.
    /// </summary>
    protected virtual async Task EasterEggAsync()
    {
        // HEY OVER HERE! DO SOMETHING COOL!
    }
#endregion

}

Now all you have to do is add whatever your easter egg logic is in the EasterEggAsync method! In this method, you can also track what the current Xamarin.Forms Page is visible by tracking the App.Current.MainPage to add some context to the page your in.

Now let’s look at the iOS implementation.

iOS Shake Detection

iOS makes this process a whole lot easier. We don’t have to do any crazy accelerometer calculations, state tracking, or any of the gross stuff above for Android. Instead, we simply use the built in Gesture API from UIKit and register that we are listening to these types of gestures in the AppDelegate:

AppDelegate.cs

[Register("AppDelegate")]
public class AppDelegate : UIApplicationDelegate
{

    public override UIWindow Window { get; set; }
    public static AppDelegate Current { get; private set; }


    public override bool FinishedLaunching(UIApplication application, NSDictionary launchOptions)
    {
        // Allow shake detection
        UIApplication.SharedApplication.ApplicationSupportsShakeToEdit = true;

        // make this more accessible
        Current = this;
        Forms.Init();

        // we did it! the app is launched!
        return true;
    }
}

Now that we have registered with the UIApplication.SharedApplication.ApplicationSupportsShakeToEdit, we can start overriding the gesture recognizer. If you’re using Xamarin.Forms, you can do this right in the AppDelegate but if you’re not, then you can use this override method in any ViewController or even any sub-UIView class!

/// <summary>
/// Handles when a general motion has ended on the view controller. 
/// We use this to detect the shake of the phone to execute and easter egg
/// </summary>
/// <param name="motion">Motion.</param>
/// <param name="evt">Evt.</param>
public override async void MotionEnded(UIEventSubtype motion, UIEvent evt)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Motion detected");
    if (motion == UIEventSubtype.MotionShake)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("and was a shake");

        await EasterEggAsync();
    }
}

/// <summary>
/// Execute the easter egg async.
/// </summary>
protected virtual async Task EasterEggAsync()
{
    // HEY OVER HERE! DO SOMETHING COOL!
}

// if you're in the view controller then you also need to:

public override bool CanBecomeFirstResponder
{
    get
    {
        return true;
    }
}

/// <summary>
/// Enables the first responder set to allow for shake detection
/// </summary>
/// <param name="animated">If set to <c>true</c> animated.</param>
public override void ViewWillAppear(bool animated)
{
    base.ViewWillAppear(animated);
    this.BecomeFirstResponder();
    // .. other logic
}

Doing this enabled the gesture to be picked up at the application level or in the current UIViewController. You need to ensure the CanBecomeFirstResponder is true and that you call BecomeFirstResponder() on appearing so that the MotionEnded override can be called.

Once again, just fill in the EasterEggAsync method with whatever easter egg you want to invoke!

Conclusion

Easter eggs can make a neat experience in your mobile applications, but using this shake gesture can also help make debugging easier as well as give a QA team the chance to quickly move through stories in the app. In a future post, we will talk more about these possibilities and the benefits of building testing and development options into your apps for testing rather than user-focused and fun easter eggs.

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