Xamarin Mobile Development for Android Cookbook

Detecting device shakes

A fairly common gesture that can be implemented using sensors is the shake gesture. This can be used to shuffle cards in a game or tracks in a playlist.

How to do it...

To detect a shake, we will need to record the data from the accelerometer and determine whether a shake has occurred:

1. First, we implement the ISensorEventListener interface, and register it with the manager:

   var manager = SensorManager.FromContext(this);
   var type = SensorType.Accelerometer;
   var accelerometer = manager.GetDefaultSensor(type);
   manager.RegisterListener(
     this, accelerometer, SensorDelay.Fastest);

2. Then, we will need a few fields that will store the values across the accelerometer events:

   private int lastUpdate; private float lastX; private float lastY; ...