While You Wait is a cross-platform application developed in Xamarin Studio. It’s been released for Android and iOS.
The main focus was to make a “wait in line” or “queue” application aimed at restaurants, hairdressersor or similar. The main use-case would be as following; The waiter at the restaurant doesn’t have any free tables, so the waiter would enter a customers mobile number and name. This would place the customer in a queue and also notify the customer by SMS. Whenever a table would become available the waiter would send a notification by SMS to the customer.
The application is constructed using different APIs. It’s using an online database, Parse, which integrates seamlessly into Xamarin through the component store. And Twilio which is used for the SMS part of the application. Twilio offers a REST API that accepts the applications queries to send SMS to the customers.
The application is taking advantage of Xamarin’s new tool; Xamarin.forms. These tools makes it way easier to develop a cross-platform applications. Xamarin uses the Mono runtime and already let’s you share business logic on many platforms through a PCL or Shared project. However, what Xamarin.forms allows you to do is to share your UI code cross-platform as well. Forms is only compatible on Android, iOS, and Windows phone (as of August 2015) which is perfect if you’re a mobile developer 🙂
