News

New Syncfusion Release Adds Android, iOS Controls

• By David Ramel
• January 9, 2015

Recognizing the cross-platform handwriting on the mobile development wall, traditional Windows toolmaker Syncfusion Inc. has for the first time added Android and iOS controls to its flagship studio product.

With an increased focus on mobile development, Essential Studio 2014 Volume 4 includes 16 chart types and new gauges for Android and iOS development, along with a TreeMap control that arranges data in clustered rectangles.

"Each suite includes a chart control that features area, column, bar, line, and doughnut charts, as well as various stacking charts and advanced financial charts," said exec Graham High in a blog post yesterday. "The charts also support numerical axes, categorical axes, and even a date-time axis to give developers the flexibility to deliver exactly the kinds of charts their users need.

"Essential Studio for Android and Essential Studio for iOS also include linear gauge, circular gauge, digital gauge, and tree map controls to provide a variety of data visualizations for any scenario, whether you need to display hierarchical data, qualitative information, or a range of values in your Android and iOS apps."

Following the lead of Microsoft, Syncfusion also furthered its cross-platform mobile development efforts by expanding its Xamarin.Forms suite. The cross-platform Xamarin.Forms has become increasingly integrated with Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE for developers targeting Android, iOS and Windows Phone platforms.

"In Essential Studio for Xamarin, the Chart control has been updated to support a doughnut chart, allowing users to plot quantities as they relate to the whole," High said. "Other significant additions to our Xamarin controls are new linear gauge and digital gauge controls."

Many other enhancements for the new version include: updates to numerous controls; new JavaScript controls; new ASP.NET suite features; and the official release of 18 LightSwitch HTML extensions, which had been in preview. New features and controls were also added to Windows Phone, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET MVC, WinRT and even Silverlight products.

"As a company, we strive to provide convenient, affordable solutions for developers," said exec Daniel Jebaraj in a statement announcing the fourth major release of 2014. "We pay particular attention to the needs of enterprise software development teams. One need in particular that we recognized was the demand for a complete set of controls for Android and iOS development. Essential Studio 2014 Volume 4 is, by far, the largest mobile development product targeting enterprise mobile development on the market. Our new suite of controls and updates allows developers to take their work to the next level without having to reinvent the wheel on each platform."