It’s been a year since I posted however I did write to articles I didn’t publish. Been busy I guess. I had a game project that got destroyed when the client died. Those involved are still sorting it out.

Last week I published an update to Google Play for an app I first published in 2017. It is a desktop app that runs on mobile including iOS and Windows. It was developed using Xamarin Forms which MS stopped supporting in May 2024. That caused some consternation in the developer community because many felt that the replacement .net MAUI was really not ready for prime time. It was okay maybe for picture gallery apps or restaurant menus but not extensive apps.

So last week I published the MAUI version, a little rushed because the August 31st and we had to update the app to Android 15 to continue publishing. There were a few unexpected quirks. Some users thought they lost their data they had saved. But it was there but they just couldn’t see it because they were running Dark Mode on their Android device.

On Xamarin by default it ignored Dark Mode and if you wanted the option for the user you needed to add a theme for it. No one ever asked for it. Fortunately there was a workaround to ignore it for MAUI. That and a few other quirks required some quick updates. At the moment all is calm.

What I want to address is the attitude of some of the MAUI developers that the mobile industry is moving fast we all have to keep up with it. Those developers never apparently worked in the field and don’t know what it’s like to update particularly a large project. And it seems there is also an attitude of change for the sake of change (I was surprised deep digging through MAUI how much Xamarin still is there).

I think the general public might be just as happy if things slowed down a bit. My is based on a Windows app I wrote in 2003. That app can still run today even on Windows 11.

No I didn’t misspell “Blog” and intended to say “Bog” because things have been that way around here. Kinda deep and stuck in some things to keep moving forward.

It is a pleasure to be able to use Visual Studio Code again for creating and editing posts and the website. I was able to use it for years until the last couple years when the app got so huge that it dragged. Though VS Code is well know for it’s huge size the problem was also I was trying to run on a Linux desktop built in 2011 and running Ubuntu Studio. And that with only 4GB of memory.

So rather than building a new tower I got a mini-PC with 16 GB of memory, SSD storage and screaming CPU speed. All that for almost 1/3 of the cost of the old desktop. And at 4x4” square not taking up so much space.

Needless to say it is a different experience though some of it is going from Ubuntu Studio 20.04 (Xbuntu) to version 24.04 using Kbuntu because the Xbuntu version isn’t available yet.

The mini-PC did come with Windows 11 installed so I ran it first to register it in case I “ever” need to use it on this machine. But that’s doubtful because sometime in the next few months I will be replacing my Windows 10 development PC with a Windows 11 system. That game PC I use for development is not capable of the Win11 install.

So I am still plaguing with “Not Responding” messages and the “Activity” indicator spinning on that Windows 10 machine. Makes me think that Microsoft is doing that to get people to migrate to Windows 11. Perhaps the big M has too much money to think about the economic problems dropped on the populace the last 4 years to expect them to upgrade so easily. Not to mention problems with their own product development especially .NET MAUI.

That problem resulted in having to delay my migration to MAUI which was announced in early 2000 and I liked the idea of replacing Xamarin with MAUI because it simplified the projects. In that case having both desktop and mobile in the same project. At this time I have been moving my Xamarin desktop app to MAUI. Since I have a backend of code for the app that can be used for various projects their upgrade tool make a good job changing namespaces and some of the “usings” from Xamarin Forms to MAUI. But I’ve yet to see how many other snags I’ll run into. Fortunately over the last few years as MAUI progressed I have been building some smaller apps using MAUI to exercise the platform.