Windows 11 is out and Windows 10 is yesterday’s news. Unfortunately many will not be able to install Windows 11. I can’t on my two Windows 10 desktops. But I suspect if I need to test my Windows apps on 11 I’ll just buy a low end Windows 11 laptop and use that until I can afford to update my development PC.
Currently my nickname for Windows 10 is “Not Responding” because that is what I often see on the title bar on my development PC. Mind you the PC is a game PC with an Nvidia graphics card on it. Problem is it is 6 years old. I guess we’re expected to buy a new PC every two years.
Most likely Windows 10 is a gargantuan mess for Microsoft engineers to deal with. I’m not expecting any better from Windows 11. At least not until Microsoft swallows their pride and puts the Windows UI on top of Linux just like Apple put their UI on top of BSD Unix. As it is Linux may be run on Windows with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). Visual Studio Windows ran it or something like it to cross compile C++ to Android.
But for me on my aging PC often this means watching slow app response and launches, too much seeing that blue “activity indicator” spinning and tracking down “workarounds” for things that aren’t working like they should for developing my Xamarin based apps.
I adopted Xamarin years ago to build apps both for Windows and Android. My first Xamarin app was JyotishTools Pro because I wanted one code base for Android, iOS and Windows. It has worked well.
The forthcoming replacement for Xamarin called Maui is even better allowing for building apps for Android, iOS, Windows UI and MacOS. There is even a community effort to include Linux builds. Interesting thing about MacOS is that I had planned to do Mac versions but Apple now has MacCatalyst which allows my iPhone app to run on M1 (ARM) Macs.
Along that line I have often been asked if the iPhone app may be run on an iPad. Apple didn’t tell me but back in 2019 it became possible for the iPhone to do that by “letterboxing” the app. But I think most of my users on the iPad prefer the landscape version that is the iPad version. Currently the iPad listing on the App Store doesn’t say it can be run on an M1 Mac though the iPhone version does. A future edition may be “responsive design” so one UI fits all.
I also have been checking out Google’s cross development platform Flutter. I was slow to try it because it uses a Dart as a language. But Dart is similar to C# so I was able to convert my C# planetary engine to Dart. Flutter already supports Linux. Only problem so far is that I can only build Windows and Android on the PC. IOS is not cross like Xamarin one needs to move the source over to the Mac for that (unless I’m missing something). Same with Linux.
About Windows. Microsoft developed Universal Windows Platform (UWP) which is currently runs on my Windows app. It looks more like a mobile app. No one particularly complained to me about that but maybe they did to other developers. Hence with Maui there is WinUI which looks more like the conventional Windows desktop. Same code that runs on Android run on it too.
Only problem is that Maui has been pushed out to Q2 2022. It was supposed to be released this month (November 2021) but yes it was nowhere near ready for that.
PS: on a side note some may notice the tags and archive sidebar is missing. Problem with Hexo is that when a new post is added the sidebar needs to updated on each post which is ridiculous. So I got rid of the sidebar. Archives are still available at the top.