Boy it is cold for California these days. We’ve even had some record lows. Guess it gives me more time write something for the blog.

Seems that Visual Studio Code has just got way too bloated to use for this work. My ancient Linux box doesn’t handle it well anymore so I’m trying other editors.

I’ve been testing the Visual Studio 2022 MAUI migration tool for my Xamarin app update. Google wants apps updated fall 2024 to target Android 14. Microsoft does not plan to update Xamarin for that support so the app has to be move to MAUI. Surprisingly some of the migration has gone well though plenty of errors. But most of those are because my app uses a lot of popup dialogs and the Xamarin third party popup package was unable to be ported to MAUI. So popups were included now in MAUI and actually testing my popups worked well without much additional work.

The app is large for a mobile app and has two libraries but for the most part those are just C# code which works too with .net 7. Of course given the deadline this is a lazy project plus the migration tool is in beta.

Other projects lately have been more HTML apps for my app website. One is a scratchpad tool for a tutorial on a vedic astrology system that has been gaining popularity. I hope to add that this week.

I am kinda amused at the AI talk these days. Reminds me of “dot com boom” and now we have an “AI boom”. Interesting to see the tools available. I’ve mentioned before that I worked with one of those but the tutorial went out of date. Of course the thing I worry about is politicians deciding how AI should be regulated. That should be quite a circus.

As I once posted I don’t seem to be much of a blogger. But then when I go to sit down to write a post today using Visual Studio Code it immediately hangs up the show by telling me I have deprecated extensions. Try to dismiss that notification led to hanging up Code. Wonderful. So when I relaunched Code I decided to see what notifications are deprecated. Turns out to be ones I either haven’t needed to use in ages or a couple that didn’t do what I wanted.

That leads me to wondering how anyone can get anything done as when they sit down to do some work the tool demands you wait until you update all this stuff that might not actually need to be updated right away. What is it? Some young engineer wanting to show off to mom and dad that their little feature just got in the app? Mostly so I think.

One of the things I like about Linux is the updates can be done when you want them to not when some engineer thinks you should do them. On Windows one dreads the second Tuesday of each month and I immediately go to settings and delay the update a week (or more). But then that allows me to do what I do in Linux, run the updates when I want!

What I really wanted to write about today was an experience developing a small simple web app that just didn’t seem to exist anywhere. First I did the app using .NET, yes on Windows because there is no Visual Studio on Linux though one can do .NET apps on Linux but I don’t think Microsoft wants to give Linux a real chance to take over the desktop world (Windows is a concept about 20 years out of date anyway).

Anyway that app needed an interface and for the fun of it decided to rewrite it in HTML because I could create an interface quickly with HTML. In this case it was a “drag ‘n drop” interface. This worked well and the rest of the code was JavaScript which I happened to have around so I made it an HTML/JavaScript app.

Turns out it worked slick so I posted it on my Vedic Astrology app website as a free tool. It became very popular. Just one problem: drag ‘n drop doesn’t work or work well on mobile. Now we know all the tech bigwigs want the world to go all mobile probably though some “carbon footprint” agenda.

However the parts of UI that allow drag ‘n drop on a desktop were hijacked to do scrolling on mobile pages. So I went back and redid the interface with a dropdown menu to select an item to be place on a chart and if you put it in the wrong place then just click on the right place and it gets moved there. Posted it and visits went way up. And app sales too.

Moral of the story: if you want more visits to your site put up some free stuff. That’s actually how I got started in the Internet age by posting a free Windows app back 1998.

Coda: I want to re-add comments to the posts but things need sorting out first. A mistake messed up the Discuss comments and there seemed to be no way to start over with those which seems a little strange. And then with Firefox for some reason I get an old version version of this blog when I don’t put www. in front of the domain. I know someone who also got that too so I may need to go have a chat with one of the web host engineers because I can’t see how it is happening.