Back again with another exciting post about this fun and ever changing field of software development. As I have mentioned before I moved this blog a while back from the Hugo to the Hexo static site generator. One thing I did notice though regardless of either is that a static site might not be the best way to do a blog. When you add a post and then update it the way it works in both generators is every page and a few other files need to be uploaded again. Why? Look on the right. There is a sidebar with indexed list of posts. Every page needs to updated that has that sidebar.

Years ago my main product site was served using PHP. Now that seems like that might be a good idea again though actually a static site for app products should work just fine, just do away with the sidebar. My current temporary site just as a few HTML files and very little will change. A bigger site with all the “bells and whistles” is a little more complicated.

Thing is with a blog using PHP I just had empty HTML files that would display the latest php file for content. Very easy to update and takes little time. A sidebar for a blog would be the same thing as it would only need to grab the latest php sidebar file. What I need to do is make an app to maintain and automate much of such a site. We’ll see what happens.

Now that said there are dynamic page generators. Most work on Node.js and often using React. Fine but you’ll need a CDN to serve those pages which is something most individual or small developers can afford. The usual suspects (web hosts) don’t have those.

The reason my main site broke was because I updated my Linux machine and a library that Hugo uses seems to still be broken on Linux. I also tried taking the site over to Windows and running the latest Hugo there but that didn’t work either. Much of the problem was that they changed a lot of how the scripts and templates worked not only to my chagrin but a lot of other folks as well.

Such is fun and games in the field of software development.

So about 3 months ago I wrote a post about how our development tools often waste a lot of our often delaying productivity. Twenty years ago this would have been unacceptable. But these days with “free” tools and budget cuts for them we can often spend more time with our tools getting them to work than we should.

When I left off I was waiting for Xcode 12.1 to install. Well it installed and I tested the matter at hand and didn’t quite see the problem the user was reporting. So closed up things and here I am today trying to do a release version of the app with some additional fixes that Android and Windows also got. So then Xamarin tells me that Visual Studio 2019 won’t work with Xcode 11.5. Hmm, I swear I installed 12.1. Apparently not but it was running so Xamarin used it three months ago.

So this afternoon I finding out how to remove 11.5 and make 12.1 the default Xcode. Guess I’m also going to need a Mac cheat sheet because I’m not on it every day and often not every month either. Anyway I got Xcode 11.5 removed by dragging it’s icon out of the Applications folder into the trash bin. Then you have to empty the trash (the article seemed to neglect that). Next I needed to drag the Xcode 12.1 into Applications. Well for some reason it is hard to drag it there and it installed to the desktop. Thing is this takes forever and now I’m waiting for it to finish the “drag” to the Applications folder. What a funky way of doing things!

Maybe there is a way to cancel such “drags” but I haven’t found it yet. Now I’m not sure if the fact that I was too cheap to buy an external SSD for more memory and bought a 500GB HDD instead but it was all of $36. SSD was a lot more and users complained it ran hot (the HDD doesn’t). And then once everything is copacetic the slowness doesn’t effect builds much.

I put the iOS builds last because they get scrutinized more by Apple than Android or Windows. Google does little of that with an Android submission to Google Play and Microsoft maybe a little more though some of that testing is done on the developer’s machine. At least if I put the iOS submissions last I can include anything overlooked errors that the Android and Windows users find.