Detailed steps of the installation are as follows:

1) Easiest is to start with the manual installation procedure for Xamarin.Android as per the instructions on the Xamarin website.

Proceed up until step 4. It is important to note here that a common source of error is that more than one version of Android SDK Build-tools gets installed if you use the Xamarin Universal Installer after installing the Android SDK manually. Due to this bug we recommend the clean and transparent manual installation procedure over the automated one. Make sure you have the latest and only the latest version of Android SDK Tools / Android SDK Platform-tools / Android SDK Build-tools on your build machine. Delete any other versions from Android SDK Manager if necessary.

2) Download Microsoft Portable Library Tools 2 for Visual Studio 2010 and run the installer from the Command Prompt with the ‘/buildmachine’ switch:

C:\>PortableLibraryTools.exe /buildmachine

The command line switch will let you install the tools without a copy of Visual Studio.

3) Download and install the Microsoft .NET Portable Library Reference Assemblies 4.6 package. Now go into ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft .NET Portable Library Reference Assemblies 4.6\’ and extract the ‘PortableReferenceAssemblies.zip’ archive into assemblies directory ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETPortable\’.

4) Log in to you Xamarin account, go to ‘Downloads’ and download the latest version of the all-in-one Xamarin.Android+Xamarin Studio+Visual Studio extensions installer (but NOT! the Universal Installer). To do this you have to click ‘View all versions’ under the big download button, select ‘Windows’ then ‘x.y.z – Latest version (release date)’. Finally, run the installer and hopefully you’re done.

By now you should be able to load and build PCL projects. For starters create a blank app with Xamarin.Forms Portable (found under C#/Mobile Apps/Blank App (Xamarin.Forms Portable)), build it then run it on the emulator.

There’s an ongoing forum discussion on the related issues in the Xamarin forums.

We create all kinds of mobile and web apps for clients; we are not talking about games here but business / utility apps. As clients usually want a ‘mobile’ app and not an iOS app anymore, we decided to go cross platform with Xamarin. It’s a great choice as it gives you the ability to still publish native apps on different devices instead of dealing with HTML5-based ‘solutions’.

We are also creating our new game in Unity which means finally we are going cross-platform with games as well! Stay tuned for that, it’s coming soon!

So many of you have been asking about the Android version of Soctics.. believe me, nothing would make me happier than having it already available. We’ve started the porting actually a long time ago but for various reasons we are always hitting one wall or another..

However, we haven’t given up on bringing Soctics to the world outside iOS. We’ll port it with Unity and hopefully still this year a significantly bigger audience can enjoy our competitive turn based football game

After the Unity port is complete, we’ll be able to introduce some new stuff in Soctics but it will have to wait for now. Mostly we are talking about some iterative changes and probably some cosmetics, nothing that would re-shape the game. We are pretty satisfied with how the game feels at the moment.

That’s it folks!

In this article, I’ll briefly talk about the tools we built and use to communicate with our customers.

Having worked a little on support (among many things) in a multinational company, it felt natural to ship our products so that we can communicate with our players.  In the early days, it was only two features we did tho:

• Message Of The Day (MOTD)
• In app Feedback

The first is a great tool to broadcast messages to all our customers, while the latter is useful for us to learn our customers’ needs. With MOTD we can broadcast messages like, when our new release will be due or available, or even when our multiplayer game server is down for maintenance (that server runs on a different stack). In the early days, it was only text we could deliver but little by little we added more features. Now it’s capable of opening urls inapp to show web pages including videos or forms to collect email addresses, which proved to be very effective in cross promotion when we released Soctics League. (In a coming article, I’ll write more about this).  Also, very effective in making our players tweet their love of the game.

Technically, there’s nothing fancy. We keep a json file updated with the necessary information, something like this:

{"valid_date":"2012-09-30 22:00",
"msg":"For the latest news, updates and promotions you can follow us on facebook.com/Soctics",
"title":"Follow Us On Facebook",
"cancel_title":"Later",
"open_url": {
"alt_url":"http://www.facebook.com/Soctics",
"url":"fb://page/277639452342883",
"open_title":"Follow"
}
}


We use a simple AlertView to show this message. The title / message and the buttons are customized with the content of the json.

Note the open_url part. With url and alt_url we can make sure, that devices with or without the Facebook app being installed can open the Facebook page of Soctics.
(ie: [[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:url]).

This was also extremely effective in getting our players tweet about Soctics. Hundreds of players were willing to press the Tweet button and then post a pre-edited text. Maybe the smilies helped there too

The relevant part for Twitter goes like this:

"open_url": {
"alt_url":"http://www.twitter.com/?status=@AppStore+Soctics+League+is+my+favourite+game",
"url":"twitter://post?message=@AppStore%20Soctics%20League%20is%20my%20favourite%20game",
"open_title":"Tweet "
},


Feedback turned out to be very useful as well. Not only would players send their best advices but also it’s more likely to share their frustration on the feedback channel rather than on  the app store, resulting higher app rating. Also, when we manage to finish something they asked for, its also reflected by the stars.

Feedback however, was a one way communication: from customers to us. Thus we had to fix that by adding a feature that we can use to privately answer feedbacks. This is very powerful as not only get’s a feedback message answered but many times that ends up in a discussion which is very useful to dig deep and clarify problems and ideas.

Notice the empty line in the alert view. \n goes a long way. The UIAlertView also supports longer text that are bigger then a screen, although thats not as nice as the default look.

There is one more thing we did use a lot while developing and after releasing Soctics League, which is real time chat but is not tied yet to our MOTD system. The real time chat room was first introduced in the previous version of the game where players could chat between matches. We did also visited it and gave real time support to our customers. This is probably the most time consuming form of customer care but while doing so, many of our customers gave valuable feedback just because we were accessible. Probably, many of those players wouldn’t even write a feedback.

What tools, methods are you using for talking to your customers?

Would you be interested in using something like this?

Would you be interested in an easy to integrate SDK along with a web page that lets you do what I described above?  Sign up at our LaunchRock site motd.bitongo.com or just leave a comment here.

UPDATE: here is another post further discussing what MOTD is capable of: how-we-used-uiwebview-along-with-launchrock-to-engage-mobile-users.