If you were able to read last year’s post about updating this blog then you were lucky. I mentioned before that this site was unreachable for awhile do to a DNS mixup. Seems it happened again. So this time I decided to drop the old static site generator, Hugo, and am trying Gatsby. For one thing Hugo use Go as a language and I was not that familiar with it. Gatsby uses Javascript which I am familiar with. So here is the site in Gatsby.

Cross Platform Update: I finally did get a MacBook Air a little over a year ago and have been publishing iOS apps. Also planned is a Mac app too since there are very few in that app genre. This will also be the basis of another cross platform app with a different layout. The current Xamarin project has two sets of code: one for portrait (phones) and one for tablets and desktop in landscape.

Before I actually began that project I had played with responsive design in C#. But users seemed to want the tablet layout for Android similar to my smaller app except they didn’t buy, they just got the phone version instead since it works on both phone and tablets. I was also unaware that iPads are 4:3 aspect ratio not 16:9. There are Android tablets that are 4:3 but Android letterboxes if your layout is 16:9 and Apple doesn’t. Allowing iPads to use the portrait view presented a very unacceptable distorted layout unfortunately so the iPhone version is phone only. So some users were disappointed if they had to buy both versions if they wanted to run the app both on iPad and iPhone. Needless to say the new app will be responsive design and one set of code!

Software development continues to get crazier and crazier. Google told Android developers that we needed to support 64-bit. Actually 64-bit doesn’t exactly improve my app any, it just made the apk 5MB larger. Even working on a game for Android a 64-bit version wasn’t any faster but was actually slower (however that may be the inexpensive 64-bit tablet I’ve been testing on). The real benefit of 64-bit is larger addressing space but I doubt if Android phones are going to have mega terabyte drives anytime soon.

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.