Sprinkled with awesomeness

[UdaraAlwis]

1. Improving the Splash page Animation
2. Adopted the most visited destinations in the world for Home page Carousel
3. Refined the search terms for scenic tourist photos from Bing
4. Added Destination Gallery page, consisting of scenic travel photos from Bing
5. Added the list of countries and navigate to their Gallery page from Home page
6. Revamping home page design
   • Getting rid of confusing layout
   • Focusing on the travel photo background
7. Revamping all the page designs
   • Adopting clean minimalist design
   • Fluid and responsive
   • Color values are unified to match a common theme
   • Adopting white and dark grey color based theme
   • Added Android Status bar color values
8. Improved on Language translation features
   • Translate to any language available
   • Load the full list of available languages
   • Translate in bulk to multiple languages
   • Using Bing Translation API
9. Caching Destination Search data in memory
10. Added emoji support for Labels

Screenshots:

New Splash Screen Animation:

iOS and Android:

New UI Design and Features:

Home Page with User Photos

iOS and Android:

Home Page

iOS and Android:

Add Photo Page

iOS and Android:

Home Page go to Destination Page

iOS and Android:

Home Page go to Destination Page

iOS and Android:

Destination Gallery Page

iOS and Android:

Translation Page

iOS and Android:

Select Languages Page

iOS and Android:

Questions and Answers:

Thoughts on the Azure Cognitive Services?
It was surprisingly easy to integrate these kinds of cool features with Azure Cognitive Services without having to deal with any complicated computing.

Xamarin.Forms elements you extended?
I found the new Pancake View was quite handful, specially in crafting those gradient effects.

What went well and what did not?
I tried to extend Bing Search further with Pivot Suggestions and Query Expressions, but didn't go as well as I planned given the time constraint.
It was quite difficult to balance the Free tier limitations during the debugging, given that for Mobile apps we need to test them in Android and iOS repeatedly, recompile and redeploy, running those API calls for testing, but I guess as a solution I could have created a fake data layer.

That's pretty much it. Thank you guys for this awesome opportunity! :) @jfversluis @codemillmatt

[codemillmatt]

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