Been a couple of months but it is still busy here. In a few days it will be spring but it has been very cold for the California Bay Area. Last week PG&E shut off power for a few hours to install some new utility poles. I went out for some coffee, breakfast, a walk at the park that you see above and stopped off for some grocery shopping. The only thing I bought that needed refrigeration was a brick on cheese. The house was so cold that I was able to leave it on the kitchen table and when the power came back up 3 hours later the cheese was just as cold as it would have been in the refer.
Programming wise I’ve been playing around with the Avalonia cross platform framework. The last time I played around with it probably a couple years ago I thought it wasn’t ready for prime time. Still really not ready at least for my use. My users don’t like the Xamarin UWP UI for Windows. They still like the UI on my 23 year old MFC app.
Microsoft is aware that UWP was kind of a failure. Too me my app has the same information as the old app though improved and some more features and really the difference is the UI frame. I’ve played around with dotnet MAUI and I don’t find WinUI that great an improvement. I guess my users like the “Excel” look from that earlier era.
As for Xamarin, it’s support ends in May even though as I mentioned above they did support Android 14 rather than force us over to MAUI. Users don’t often like changes in interfaces. Some of my competitors leave the old app with it’s interface available and make a new app with a different name and UI. I may go that route. I’ve already written a smaller app for a special purpose with MAUI. So why Avalonia? Kinda like to see if I could quickly do the Xamarin app with it so I can run it on Linux. Then I can answer some of the support questions without firing up a Windows machine.
Another surprise was when I wanted to test the above mentioned MAUI app on iOS, Visual Studio wants a newer Xcode which unfortunately won’t install on my Mac. I need a new one. Grrr, I thought I would have been able to get a couple more years out of the Mac I have. So maybe I better get into the inflation game and raise prices to pay for this stuff.