Looking for some advice from the more seasoned experts, but what I'm trying to achieve is an iOS and Android Smartphone app, sharing a Core Class library for the data layer and application logic - not a huge problem for me, but the user interfaces will be highly customised, for want of an example the primary record screen will look like below, but with a Tab Bar for navigation at the base;
Now, in all the little utilities and bits and pieces to date I've preferred building the UI in code, basically Xibless for iOS, I like the absolute control, and a lot of custom UI work seems to involve creating custom classes that extend the base View / Table Cell class. Yet some custom controls seem to involve work with Interface designer and Xibs - so guess am asking which direction should I focus, want to avoid going too far down one route and having to go back. Can I do all that I need in code (feel free to bombard me with examples, I'm collecting them all at the moment!)
Android, that's very new to me, certainly on the custom UI front, the same thing stands, I really want to recreate the UI as close as possible, and as I understand it it's actually a little simple as I control the layout and call customer classes within the AXML. I appreciate the methods will be completely separate from iOS, which is fine, there's a ton of learning on this project which is exciting, and scary - I just want to collect as many examples to build upon as I can.
The Xamarin docs and snippets are pretty good for most things, but they don't seem to step outside of very native controls, so either there's some API references I'm missing for customisation, or some Custom UI Class tutorials or sample code would be really helpful - I know it can be done (e.g. RDIO) I just don't yet know how!
TIA