Fun Updating the Site

My previous posts were done with a much older version version of Hugo the static site generator. In fact the version was 0.14. Hugo is now at version 0.42.2. The problem I learned was Hugo does not really maintain a Wiki with migration instructions. Turns out there wasn’t a lot to fix but those fixes weren’t that well documented.

Don’t get me wrong, Hugo is a fine tool for creating websites. A lot of hard work and fine effort has been put into it. But when I read the comments in the forum there are often unresolved problems. Currently over on the right in the sidebar you should be seeing a list of recent posts. But due to a change they aren’t there. It’s not exactly clear why they aren’t. And one thing we really don’t want to be doing is going back and editing old posts to make them work with a newer version of Hugo.

Cross Development Fun

In the last post I mentioned development using Visual Studio 2017 for developing a new app for Android, Windows and iOS. The Android app was released in late October and the Windows 10 version a week ago. For now the iOS version is on hold until next year. I still have to buy a Mac. The game using SDL2 is also on hold until funding is forthcoming.

This was my first experience with the Windows Store. I found it a much more mature experience than Google Play which has some things missing. For one, I was able to offer the Windows 10 app, which runs on both desktop and mobile with a 7 day free trial which currently is not possible on Google Play. Microsoft has 1, 7, 15 and 30 day free trial options. So unlike Android where I created some minimally functioning demo versions the trial version suffices.

I was also able to test the app with a Windows 10 8” tablet, the Digiland DL808W, which I picked up for less than $50 at Fry’s. Everything functioned perfectly on this little tablet except for Bing Maps. Looking at the debug monitor even when running on my Windows 10 PC, maps takes up a lot of memory so the 1 GB memory was not enough. Keep in mind that Google Maps will run on Android devices with only 512 MB of memory. Obviously Microsoft needs to do some optimization.

One thing about the Windows Store is that Microsoft signs the app so small developers don’t need to purchase a code signing certificate which can be very daunting. But since they sign the app they apparently want to check out every update so those don’t go up as quickly as they do on Google Play so I will stage update farther apart.

The app on Windows Store:

BTW, if you tried accessing this site recently it probably didn’t come up. My web hosting company somehow messed up the DNS. As soon as I noticed they remedied it quickly after I called.