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07
Oct
2018
Introducing Coinpaprika and announcing C# API Client

Introducing Coinpaprika and announcing C# API Client

As I am diving deeper and deeper into the world of cryptocurrencies, I am exploring quite some interesting products. One of them is Coinpaprika, a market research site with some extensive information on every coin they have listed.

What is Coinpaprika?

In the world of cryptocurrencies, there are several things one needs to discover before investing. Starting with information on the project and its digital currencies, the persons behind a project as well as their current value and its price, there is a lot of data to walk through before investing. Several sites out there are providing aggregated information, and even provide APIs for us developers. However, most of them are

  •  extremely rate limited
  •  freemium with a complex pricing model
  •  slow

Why Coinpaprika?

A lot of services that provide aggregated data rely on data of the big players like CoinMarketCap. Coinpaprika, however, has a different strategy. They are pulling their data from a whopping number of 176 exchanges into their own databases, without any proxy. They have their own valuation system and a very fast refreshing rate (16 000 price updates per minute). If you have some time and want to compare how prices match up with their competition, Coinpaprika even implemented a metrics page for you. In my personal experience, their data is more reliable average to those values I see on those exchanges I deal with (Binance, Coinbase, BitPanda, Changelly, Shapeshift).

Coinpaprika API and Clients

Early last week, I discovered Coinpaprika on Steemit. They announced their API is now available to the general public along with clients for PHP, GO, Swift and NodeJS. Coinpaprika has also a WordPress plugin and an embeddable widget (on a coin’s detail page) that allows you to easily show price information on your website. After discovering their site, I got in contact with them to discuss a possible C# implementation for several reasons:

  •  very generous rate limits (25 920 00 requests per month, others are around 6 000 to 10 000), which enables very different implementation scenarios
  •  their API is fast like hell
  •  their independence from third parties besides exchanges
  •  their very catchy name (just being honest)

A few days later, I was able to discuss the publication of the C# API client implementation I wrote with them. I am happy to announce that you can now download the C# API Client from Nuget or fork it from my Github repository. They will also link to it from their official API repository soon. The readme-file on Github serves as documentation as well and shows how to easily integrate their data into your .NET apps. The library itself is written in .NET Standard 2.0. If there is the need to target lower versions, feel free to open a pull request on Github. The Github repo contains also a console tester application.

Conclusion

If you need reliable market data and information on the different projects behind all those cryptocurrencies, you should evaluate Coinpaprika. They aggregate their data without any third party involved and provide an easy to use and blazing fast API. I hope my contribution in form of the C# API client will be helpful for some of you out there.

If you like their product as much as I do, follow them:

  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/coinpaprika
  • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coinpaprika/
  • Steemit: https://steemit.com/@coinpaprika
  • Medium: https://medium.com/coinpaprika
  • Telegram: https://t.me/Coinpaprika

Happy coding, everyone!

Disclaimer: I am contributing to this project with code written by me under the MIT License. Future contributions may contain their own (and different) disclaimer. I am not getting paid for my contributions to the project.

Please note that none of my crypto related posts is an investment or financial advice. As crypto currencies are volatile and risky,  you should only invest as much as you can afford to lose. Always do your own research!

Posted by msicc in Crypto&Blockchain, Dev Stories, 1 comment
04
Feb
2015

Simple helper method to detect the last page of API data (C#)

When you are working with APIs from web services, you probably ran already into the same problem that I did recently: how to detect if we are on the last page of possible API results.

Some APIs (like WordPress) use tokens to be sent as parameter  with your request, and if the token is null or empty you know that you have reached the last page. However, not all APIs are working that way (for example UserVoice).

As I am rewriting Voices Admin to be a Universal app, I came up with a simple but effective helper method that allows me to easily detect if I am on the last page. Here is what I did:

	public static bool IsLastPage(int total, int countperpage, int current)
        {
            bool value = false;

            if (current < Convert.ToInt32(Math.Ceiling(Convert.ToDouble(total)/countperpage)))
            {
                value = false;
            }

            if (current == Convert.ToInt32(Math.Ceiling(Convert.ToDouble(total)/countperpage)))
                value = true;

            return value;
        }

As you can see, I need the number of total records that can be fetched (which is returned by the API) and the property for the number per page (which is one of the optional parameters of the API). On top, I need the current page number to calculate where I am (which is also an optional parameter of the API and returned by the API result).

Now I simply need to divide the total records by the result count per page to get how many pages are used. Using the Math.Ceiling() method, I always get the correct number of pages back. What does the Math.Ceiling() method do? It just jumps up to the next absolute number, also known as “rounding toward positive infinity”.

Example: if you have 51 total records and a per page count of 10, the division will return 5.1 (which means there is only one result on the 6th page). However, we need an absolute number. Rounding the result would return 5 pages, which is wrong in this case. The Math.Ceiling() method however returns the correct value of 6.

Setting the method up as a static Boolean makes it easy to change the CanExecute property of a button for example, which will be automatically disabled if we just have loaded the last page (page 6 in my case).

As always, I hope this is helpful for some of you.

Happy coding, everyone!

Posted by msicc in Archive, 2 comments
26
Aug
2014

Book review: iOS Development with Xamarin Cookbook (Dimitris Tavlikos)

I love to learn and expand my knowledge. Because of this, I was absolutely happy when I was asked for a book review about Dimitris’ iOS book.

The book is a huge collection of iOS recipes using Xamarin. The first three chapters are going deeply into the UI of an iOS application, looking on a lot (almost all) possible aspects of UI elements. What I like very much is that the author shows the code, usually with a step by step guide, and after that delivers a detailed explanation why something works in the way it does.

The next two chapters are all about creating and displaying data, files and sqlite, providing the same experience as the first chapters.

The sixth chapter is all about consuming services, such as web services, REST services or even WCF services (I wasn’t even aware of this being possible). Very good starting point for so many app ideas.

So far, the book shows already a lot of what we can do with Xamarin. But modern apps often contain media content: videos, photos, capturing media – this is what chapter 7 is all about.

Like all modern Smartphone operating systems, iOS provides some methods to let our apps interact with the OS. The 8th chapter is all about those interactions, like contacts, mail and more and has the matching real world scenarios.

The most usable apps use a device’s sensors, touch and gestures. Of course, with Apple being the leader in this space for a long time (we just need to be fair in this point), iOS has a lot of APIs for these. Chapter nine has some good recipes to help us with improving our app’s UX.

If your app needs location services and maps, chapter 10 is your friend. It shows you how to interact with Apple’s map services, add annotations and a lot more.

Users love when apps have some nice animations when something changes in an app. iOS provides a lot of options, and chapter 11 explains a lot about animations and drawing methods.

One of the most important parts when developing an app is lifecycle handling. As with any other OS, also iOS has its specific methods to handle the lifecycle. Background operations are part of this handling. In chapter 12, Dimitri tells us a lot about handling the states of an app as well as background operations.

Chapter 13 consists of tips and recipes for localization of an iOS app.

One of the most important steps when creating an iOS app is deploying the app. Apps should of course be tested on real devices, and this what chapter 14 is about – but not only. Also the required steps to prepare and app for submission as well as the submission to the store are explained.

The final chapter contains some additional recipes that can make your app more valuable like content sharing or text-to-speech.

Conclusion

I only began with Xamarin.iOS a few month ago. This book provides a great insight into development for iOS using the Xamarin IDE. As I said already, I like the approach of showing code first and then explaining what it does exactly and provide additional info if suitable. This book is absolutely worth every single cent if you want to start with iOS and Xamarin.

If you’re interested in the book, you’re just a click away: http://bit.ly/1tnxmGX

Note: This post was completely written on my phone. If you find typos, you can keep them ;-).

Posted by msicc in Dev Stories, iOS, Xamarin, 0 comments