Develop Reference

How can I make Xamarin.Forms Scroll view NOT push content off screen?

I am posting and answering my own question because this issue took me days and days to figure out, and finally I did some half-baked kludge, and then months later I found the actual answer, and I want to spare others that.
Problem: to get iOS text entry elements to scroll up and stay visible when a keyboard appears, in Xamarin Forms the easiest way is to use a ScrollView, BUT for some reason any time you use a ScrollView the dang thing resizes its content so that some of it is slightly off screen.
Content not inside ScrollView:
Content inside ScrollView:
As you can see, for some darn reason the ScrollView has its own opinion about how to lay out its contents, and that opinion is that some of it should always be off-screen.
What the heck? I've tried changing layouts and using different kinds of nesting views and adjusting layout options and margins and everything I could think of. The dang layout just always changes without me telling it to!
How do I make it behave?

ScrollView has an Orientation setting to determine the directions it can scroll. You can set it to Neither right there in the XAML, and all your content will be back where it should be.
Note that if you actually want scrolling behavior, this will mess that up. But if you're only using a ScrollView to get its nice behavior around keyboards appearing and disappearing, as I usually am, that shouldn't matter.

Children of FrameLayout not clickable on some devices

I have designed a menu that consists of a few buttons in several different LinearLayouts all placed over an animated GLSurfaceView within a FrameLayout. When the user clicks a button in the interface, I set the current layout's visibility to GONE before making the next layout VISIBLE When the user selects a level, then game play starts and all layouts are GONE (apart from a control bar on the right of the screen, but that is not contained inside the FrameLayout)
On most phones the menu works like a charm, but I did a quick test on an Xperia Ray only to find that I couldn't go anywhere because the buttons wouldn't click. I have Log.d tags set up in most of my onClick Listeners, and in this case they aren't showing in the Logcat so it doesn't seem like the Listeners are firing at all. I also noticed that the GLSurfaceView wasn't returning anything from it's own TouchEventListener. Even though the functions triggered by tapping the GLSurfaceView are disabled while on the top menu, I normally still get a message in the Logcat.
I thought it could be something to do with the way I have used the FrameLayout. The documentation says it should only have one child, but another article I read on android developers demonstrated captioning images by displaying text over ImageViews inside a FrameLayout.
On a final note, I'll also say that I've tested in the emulators and I found that both android v2.3 and android v4 display the same behaviour as the ray. Currently those are the only ones I am sure of, aside from android v2.2 which runs my app perfectly. I am hesitant to trust the results of testing on the emulators.
I am personally stumped seeing as there is no error message to go on, but can anybody suggest a solution?

I found the solution.
Turns out that I had a stray ScrollView hanging around in my layout that was both above my root layout in z-order and visible by default. Instead of toggling the visibility of this view, I was doing so for it's child layout. Oops.
On most devices I have tested on, the stray ScrollView has not effected the functionality of my app, probably because the empty layout was allowing buttons behind it to be clicked. However it turns out that some devices, such as the Xperia Ray, are a little more strict on whether clicks can be passed down through layouts (possibly a performance decision).
The ScrollView was a required part of the layout so I couldn't just remove it. Instead I gave the the android:visibilty attribute to the ScrollView so that it would be GONE until it is needed by the interface and it won't block the user from clicking buttons.

Android: How can I use the space from objects with visibility GONE?

When I try to make a layout while working with the graphical layout interface in Eclipse (and not the xml) I came across with this problem:
Let's say that my main layout is only a simple button on the bottom of the screen,
when clicked the button opens up a text box that covers most of the screen.
note : I do this be setting the visibility of the text box from GONE to VISIBLE (and the other way around when I want to hide the text box).
Now (the text box is hidden) I want to use the extra space I have and add a button to the main layout.
normally this isn't much of a problem but since I have the text box covering almost the entire screen in the graphical layout I'm having a lot of trouble doing so (and this is just an example, I want to add more complicated things to my new gained space).
What can I do ? in the graphical layout I can't hide an object (like text box or button) and I drag another button to that space I can see/work with it.

set the android:visibility attribute to "gone" while designing the layout

You are going about this all wrong.
You should be using either a new activity or a diloag box to create a textbox that covers the entire screen or a ViewFlipper to create multiple views on your activity.
It appears that you want to do it from one layout so ViewFlipper would be the simplest choice here.
The documentation is available in the usual place:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/ViewFlipper.html
Some examples can be found at:
http://www.androidpeople.com/android-viewflipper-example
http://android-pro.blogspot.com/2010/09/using-view-flipper-in-android.html
EDIT
Your question isn't very clear so I have tried to give you my best guess from the information provided. Perhaps a diagram of what you are trying to do here might be more easily understood. Though as I stated a new activity or a dialog box might be better. So you could also look at using a dialog method:
http://www.androidsnippets.com/prompt-user-input-with-an-alertdialog

Android: borders messed up on clickable view elements?

Hey folks. I have a strange problem with my EditView elements in an Android project I am working on. I make the view clickable in the xml file and put an action listener on it to launch a Uri. No problem there. What I'm finding though, is that the bottom of the view element disappears when the view is clickable. Below is a screenshot of what I mean. I added the bold/blue font to make the items stand out more, but it did that before adjusting the font as well.
Since I can't post an image here, I've linked to it below.
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0BxAyDSR7j2blZWYzYWViYjctM2E0Yi00NWFiLTllYmQtMTA3YWI3YTBhYmEw&hl=en

Turns out the problem is related to bolding the text. If I remove that, it does stop the problem. Looks like I need a better solution for pointing out clickable fields.

creating a custom image based layout on android

Is it possible to create a layout based on (background) images? For example, there is well know app called Appie that uses this picture as a homescreen:
I might be able to recreate the layout with a TableLayout, but this will be difficult to get it perfectly aligned with the buttons in the image. The default layout options make it very difficult, or maybe impossible, to allow for selection of the buttons on the image (especially when the buttons are in an arc-path).
Can anyone tell me how this is done?

I had some issues positioning a badge on the corner of a view. You can check my solved question:
Positioning a badge bubble on the left upper side of a button
About how it can be done. I would do it with a RelativeLayout and TableLayout as you mentioned, but to be completely sure, you can use apktool to see how the xml are done but it might be ilegal to do it.