Editorials

21
Dec
2022
My annual review (2022) [Editorial]

My annual review (2022) [Editorial]

In the beginning of 2022, I would never have thought of such a turbulent year. After all, we went more or less over the pandemic, and there were at least some positive signs that were sparking some hope. Pretty fast, the year turned into a memorable one, but for very ugly reasons.

Ukraine war

Russia began a war in Ukraine. We all have to battle the consequences of this war. Because of the ongoing war, prices of living have raised in all areas, be it groceries, energy costs and also entertainment costs. No day passes by without getting notified about the horrible things Russian troops are doing in Ukraine. I still pray (and you should too, if you’re into that) for the war to be finally over soon.

Twitter take-over

The second impacting event was the take-over of Twitter by Elon Musk. While he made Tesla a profitable company by focusing on the product outcome and made space travel less expensive with SpaceX, he is currently about to destroy Twitter. While I still was somehow neutral back in April when the deal became more real, I lost hope for my favourite social network the day he fired half of the company’s staff.

At the time of the take-over, I was actively working on my app TwistReader, which was a reader app for Twitter lists. I had already a beta running on TestFlight when things began to turn bad on Twitter. After UniShare (which was in the process of being ported to Android and iOS when it died), I had to take the though decision to let go also this app. I cancelled the domain I bought for the app and shut down all Azure resources already. If someone wants to continue the project, I am open to talk about it.

TwistReader promotional image

This is now the second time I had to stop an app for social media. Ultimately, I decided I will not develop against any of the social networks from now on (even though I have several ideas to improve my social flow).

As we all know, things on Twitter aren’t becoming better. My presence on the bird site serves now solely as a guide to other social media I am active on. I decided to not delete my two main accounts, but to lock them for new followers, and stopped using the service. I am mostly active on Mastodon, followed by LinkedIn (although the later one needs some more attention).

NASA is flying to the moon again

Besides all the negative stuff, there were also some good news for all of us space fans. The NASA finally sent a space-ship to the moon again. They are playing the save game and did an unmanned launch, letting the capsule orbit the Moon and come back to Earth. They made some really awesome photos along the way, and the mission was a full success.

orion space-ship with moon and earth
Image by NASA

New blog series #CASBAN6

Besides working on TwistReader, I also started to port my portfolio website away from WordPress to a self written website in ASP.NET Core with Razor pages. The site itself is already published, with links to my apps in the stores, but the news section still needs a blog. I evaluated all the options, like existing CMS plugins and other blogging platforms.

In the end, I opted into learning something new by using some bits of what I already know – and I started my recent #CASBAN6 blog series about creating a serverless blog engine on Azure. This is now my main side project.

Other dev stuff

While I am focusing on the serverless blog engine, I also have some libraries I made and use internally for Xamarin.Forms that I need to port to .NET MAUI. Some parts can be easily removed and replaced with Essentials and CommunityToolkit. There is still plenty of code worth porting left, though.

At work, I broke up the internally used libraries to be more modular and finished implementing the service templates that use them. I also continued to push source control management within the team. Besides that, I wrote some interfaces for our customers that took advantage of these things, but needed additional items as well. Over all, I was able to use some of my learnings at work and vice versa.

I also decided to not cancel my Parallels subscription. I used it around 10 time throughout the year, which is not worth paying more than 100 bucks for the yearly licence.

Furthermore, I will use the freed budget to buy a Jetbrains Ultimate licence instead, which I started to use recently. The experience in writing code is far ahead of what Microsoft offers with Visual Studio on Mac, so I guess that’s a good investment.

Sports

If you have been following along for some time, you may know that I only became a non-smoker again (after 25 years of chain-smoking) two years ago. In terms of sports, I took part in three challenges this year (Run4Fun 6,8km, 10km at Winterthur marathon and Kyburglauf 2022 10.3 km (including 425 stairs just at the end of km 10). If you want to follow my running adventures, you can find me here on Strava.

Me running the 10 km at Winterthur Marathon 2022

Outlook into 2023

Next year, the roller coaster continues to ride. I will start a new role in March as a .NET mobile developer at Galliker Switzerland, which is one of the leading companies in logistics. They have a Xamarin.Forms code base and started the transition to .NET MAUI. There will be projects where I will have to do API and Web stuff as well, so this new position will help me to move towards my goal of becoming a full stack .NET developer as well. Another plus is that I am free to choose my preferred IDE – which will be most probably RIDER after my recent experiences with it.

Of course, I will continue to with my #CASBAN6 project as well. As I stated in my last post in the series, the Azure functions part is coming up next. I will have some posts on that topic alone, but I will also keep developing it further until the final product is ready to be used in production.

Besides that, I will start to port my Fishing Knots app to .NET MAUI, which will help me to learn the upgrade process and make the app ready for the future.

In terms of sports, I will continue with running, starting up with a focus on improving my average pace to get permanently below 5 min/km. On top of that, I want to run a half-marathon at the end of the next season. I will give runningCoach another try – hopefully they will be able to import my Strava results correctly this time.

Conclusion

What was your 2022 like? What are you all looking forward in 2023? Feel free to get in contact via my social media accounts or the comments section below.

What’s left is to wish all of you a

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Posted by msicc in Editorials, 0 comments
13
Feb
2022
Book review (and recommendation): Learn T-SQL Querying

Book review (and recommendation): Learn T-SQL Querying

The Fundamentals

In the first section of the book, the authors give us an overview about the anatomy of a query (going very deep) and how SQL Server (also on Azure) processes queries. They also explain how SQL Server optimizes queries and how different versions of SQL Server are processing them differently, which can result in different performances for complex queries.

Dos and Don’ts

The second section of the book is guiding us through how Query Execution plans work and how they can help to write more efficient SQL queries. The section has a bunch of tips that developers can use in their everyday life with databases. The perhaps most important part in this section are the two chapters about T-SQL antipatterns. This is the section where I learned the most throughout the book.

Troubleshooting and tools

The last section of the book shows a lot of troubleshooting techniques and how to use them properly. Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Tools itself comes with a bunch of such tools, and the book helps not only to find them, but also to use them correctly. On top, there are also references to some Open Source tools that can be helpful at times. The book closes with the Query Tuning Assistant, which is the recommended tool to perform SQL server updates.

Conclusion

I got the book because my current job requires me to write efficient T-SQL code for the interfaces I am developing. The book already helped me during the reading time to better understand what I am doing and how I can optimize my own queries. It will be one of my reference books in future when it comes to troubleshooting and query performance with SQL. Long story short, if you are working regularly with Microsoft SQL Server (also on Azure), you should have this book in your (digital) bookshelf.

Book metadata

Posted by msicc in Book Review, Dev Stories, Editorials, 0 comments
31
Dec
2021
Goodbye, 2021!

Goodbye, 2021!

Starting at dormakaba

I started this year with a new job, moving from a shareholder register to a company for access solutions. The first month was driven by a lot of explanations and testing. The main task at my new job is to write interfaces that connect our customers’ systems with our access control software. After legally being forced to work from home, I wrote a few interfaces.

During the year, I was able to convince my team of several optimizations in terms of architecture and took also the lead on them. Establishing a core library and building interface standards that just need configuration are those with the most positive impact. We also started to use Bitbucket (the company’s choice) internally, which is also one of my maintenance tasks now.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with my first year at dormakaba even if it was (and is) challenging due to the pandemic.

Side projects

In terms of my side projects, I had a slow year. I did some minor updates to my apps and eventually published them to the stores.

The main focus was put into TwistReader (a twitter list based newsreader), which isn’t available in stores yet.

TwistReader start page (dev view)

Writing this application produced some libraries (partly public/open source, partly private only). My goal is to get the app into TestFlight in the beginning of 2022 and also to write about the libraries.

Blogging

I did not blog much this year. I covered some interesting (hopefully) topics, though:

As I mentioned above, I plan to write about the libraries and also some other stuff I did in Xamarin.Forms next year.

Private stuff

The non technical part of my year was a turbulent one. As I became non-smoker last December, I restarted the sports ambitions I lost when I was young.

I started with running, did some free runs in the beginning, continuing with training for 5 km in under 30 minutes (which I am no able to achieve constantly).

I also started to train for 10 km in under 60 minutes, but was not able to finish the training course yet. I will restart this course in 2022. If you’re into running/cycling as well, feel free to follow me on Strava.

Just running isn’t enough, however, and so I also started with regular functional strength workouts with Freeletics (follow me here).

In our family, things became different as now both of our kids are no longer at school but started to work in apprenticeship. It is amazing to see them both starting they career, even though they routes are different from what we as parents expected. I wish both of my kids the best and the strength they need to succeed.

I wish all of you a Happy New Year, success, a lot of luck and strength for all the challenges of 2022.

Stay safe and healthy, everyone!

Title Image by Markéta Machová from Pixabay

Posted by msicc in Dev Stories, Editorials, 0 comments
31
Dec
2020
Goodbye, 2020!

Goodbye, 2020!

In the beginning of 2020, I was polishing up the app for my personal blog as well as my WordPress reader library. I started to write a series about my experience on implementing push notifications with Azure which I still must finish.

During the spring lockdown, I also started a new project, which is now in the MVP (minimum viable product) state. I started to improve the overall performance by moving parts of the application to the cloud (ongoing process). I hope I will be able to share more on this project soon, but here’s already a screen shot:

TwistReader

Besides working on my personal projects and trying to get some fruit/vegetables from our garden, I was contacted by my new employer (dormakaba AG, starting 2021) in summer on StackOverflow. As I haven’t done any interview for close to 6 years at that time, I decided to “play the game” to gain some refreshing experience. I went through the entire process (which was also different due to COVID-19) and was offered the job – in the end, I accepted it.

Since I am changing my employer, I was quite busy in the last three months of the years to finish the work I started in my daytime job – which is the reason I was so quiet during that time.

2020 was a challenging year (mostly due to COVID-19). Overall, my family and I went through it and did handle most challenges quite well. My biggest personal achievement in 2020: I finally freed myself from the slavery of nicotine and became a non-smoker. Besides that, Santa did an excellent job again this year and upgraded my computer to a MacBook Pro:

2021 will still be a challenging year due to COVID-19. We will still need to keep distance, wear masks, and wash our hands (and stay at home as much as possible). I am sure there will be other challenges and hopefully plenty of chances as well.

Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay

Let me close this post by wishing you all a Happy New Year and more important: stay safe and healthy!

Title Image by iXimus from Pixabay

Posted by msicc in Editorials, 0 comments
21
Dec
2019
My 2019 (a short review)

My 2019 (a short review)

Bitcoin, Crypto payments & Linux (moving out of my comfort zone)

At the beginning of 2019, I was working on the C#-SDK for AtomicPay, a crypto payment provider. I was also working on a mobile administration app for AtomicPay but during the year, the regulatory rules changed in Switzerland for KYC (know your customer). I had to stop my efforts in this area because, for an indie developer, they are just impossible to handle.

That didn’t stop me to discover other crypto/blockchain stuff, and so I did move out of my comfort zone to play around with a Linux Server and implementing a Bitcoin full node on it. You can read more on this in the Crypto&Blockchain section of my blog.

Even though my efforts have shifted back towards mobile applications, the blockchain area is still of interest to me.

Xamarin, Xamarin, Xamarin

All of my mobile side projects this year were deeply tied into the Xamarin universe. The biggest milestone I finally achieved this year was to finish the porting of my very first application ever from Windows Phone to Android and iOS. I wrote about some of the things I learned right here:

What I’ve learned from porting my first app ever to Android and iOS with Xamarin

Barcode Scanning

The last few weeks I was busy to write a barcode scanning control for Xamarin Forms that uses native capabilities on iOS and Firebase ML on Android. It was only last week that I finally got both variants working.

Blogging

I attempted to write more regularly this year, but I clearly failed to keep up with it. One of my new year’s resolution is to keep a steady schedule of writing, as the list of what I want(ed) to write about is growing. I will go through this list during my upcoming vacation and try to find a better rhythm for my blogging efforts besides work and working on my side projects.

This year’s review is a bit different from the years before. I kept it short, focusing on the important parts (from my point of view). There is just one thing left to do in this post – to wish you all

A Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!

Title-Image by Johan L from Pixabay

Posted by msicc in Dev Stories, Editorials, 0 comments
16
Apr
2019
Crypto and Blockchain projects & tools (April 2019)

Crypto and Blockchain projects & tools (April 2019)

NOTE: All following project and tools reflect my own opinion and my own experience. This post is not an investment advice or advice to use them. Also, your mileage may vary. Please make sure you also read the disclaimer at the end of this post as well. This post contains affiliate/referral links.

For Users

Mass adoption. If you keep following the crypto and blockchain space, you might have heard this term a lot. At the moment, besides gambling dApps (decentralized applications) on different blockchains, there are only a few real-world products floating around. Let’s have a look at some of them.

Presearch

Presearch is a decentralized search engine that has more than 1 million users (as of writing this), which is quite impressive for a beta product, especially in this special area. Presearch tries to disrupt the dominance of Google (which acts as the gate to the internet for more than 70% of all users).

I have been using Presearch for a few months now as my personal gate to the internet, and I enjoy the aggregation of my preferred search engines. If you look at my start page, you can see all the search providers I have chosen. From Bing, Google to Github as well as iTunes and Spotify, everything gets searched with a click. If you open a new Tab with Presearch, you can filter the search once more. I often use the Presearch engine search, which just delivers the best results for me. I am helping the product to evolve with this behavior, as a little bonus, I get 0.25 PRE(search token) for the searches I perform.

Presearch

Presearch has protection against cheaters (AI powered) in place. I am obviously not cheating to help the product, and my honesty is rewarded with an account level of 9. They have a Chrome extension which sets the current search engine (Desktop) just by installing it. Presearch even has a mobile app (beta, iOS), which is currently not able to connect to your account which I use from time to time. However, as happened with Bing and Google before, I am using their mobile website most of the time on my iPhone.

Brave Browser

If you have been following me for some time, you know that I am a fan of Microsoft. Recently, however, Microsoft turned into a more business-oriented company, leaving the consumer to just go with the products of other providers. This led me to search for alternatives of my personal browser – so I ended up with Brave Browser.

Brave aims to be faster and more private than the default choices users have. Websites store all kind of data in cookies and use trackers to collect data from a user while the later one is browsing the web. With Brave, you get back a good amount of control of the data you are willing to share. Over time, your privacy level will grow again just by using Brave. The browser shows you how many trackers, cookies and scripts were blocked while you are browsing.

Since a few weeks, user can receive rewards for watching ads. Users will be prompted to view ads (mostly short videos), and receive some BAT, the native currency of Brave – which they can use again to reward content creators. This is an opt-in feature, so users always have the choice.

If you have a blog, website or YouTube channel, you can help the project to grow. Register your site/channel as a creator, and use your BAT rewards to tip others and invite them to join, too. This way, knowledge about Brave will spread across the web from all sides.

CoinPaprika

CoinPaprikais a market analysis tool, and it is a powerful one. I discovered the project last summer (shortly after they started). I like it “hot and spicy”, so the name alone immediately called my attention. As I have two or three app ideas that need a service like CoinPaprika, I was happy to learn they have an open API as well, with really generous API rate limits. I am contributing to the project in the form of maintaining a .NET library.

coinpaprika_client

CoinPaprika is somewhat different to other providers, as they do not rely on data of CoinMarketCap (which a lot of services in this area do). Instead, they are pulling in data of more than 250 exchanges on their own, resulting in over 2000 currencies they track. On top, they provide a great oversight on each project (click the coin stats links above to see some samples).

They are also working on a mobile app, which will combine their analysis tools with a non-custodial wallet (based on Trust Wallet’s core). You can get a short overview and register for beta notification at
https://coins.coinpaprika.com/.

AtomicPay

AtomicPay is a non-custodial payment service provider. While there are quite some providers of such services floating around, AtomicPay holds the flag of decentralization pretty high. The service just provides the invoicing infrastructure, while the payment itself is only tracked by the system. The effective payment is a direct customer to merchant transaction – the funds move directly into the merchant’s wallet. The whole infrastructure is built around Electrum and its derivations for other currencies.

atomicpay-title-image

By using common implementations like SegWit and HD (Hierarchical Deterministic) wallets as well as no address re-use, AtomicPay ensures security and privacy on a high level with a reasonable amount of initial administrative work. AtomicPay provides several integrations into already existing online shopping systems, an open Rest-API, payment buttons for websites and more.

I am also involved in this project and currently working on the official native apps for Android and iOS. We have already published a .NET SDK, which enables you already today to implement crypto payments into your apps. On our roadmap, we have a Xamarin.Forms ready plugin and SDKs for other programming languages as well.

For Developers

Being a mature programming language, C# has already quite some important and ready-to-use libraries to interact with certain blockchains. Here is a list of projects I am following:

Wallets and Exchanges

If you want to get some cryptocurrencies, you need some starting points:

  • Where to buy?
  • Where to convert/exchange?
  • Where to store HODLs?

While there are several options out there, I have found a combination that works for me.

BitPanda

Buying crypto currencies with bank transfer or credit card is pretty easy on BitPanda, an Austrian provider. They accept deposits in EUR, CHF, USD and GBP. Once your FIAT deposit is in your BitPanda account, you can exchange them for a variety of crypto currencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, NEO and more. If you want to sign up and get a 10 EUR bonus after your first purchase, you can use my referral link (I am getting the bonus as well).

Binance

Binance is one of the biggest centralized crypto exchanges around. They have a huge amount of tradeable assets and also great liquidity. If a trading pair is available on Binance, chances are high that you will get the best price there. Their apps and website offer a good default set of indicators, so you normally won’t need any additional tools. Binance is also said to be one of the few exchanges to not fake their trading volume. If you haven’t signed up to Binance, feel free to use my referral link.

ChangeNOW

ChangeNOW is a decentralized exchange that is connected to big centralized exchanges to get the best rates. On certain pairs, you have a fixed rate option besides the quick-and-dirty approach that all such services provide. However, if you use that one, you will get a smaller exchange value than with the default option because of lowering the risk. In my experience, the exchange rates reflect the current market prices more often than not. Other providers have a bigger spread.

Transactions are executed as fast as possible, if something goes wrong and you provide your wallet for refunds, your funds will always be safe. Additionally, you can provide your mail address to get informed when the exchange took place (so you won’t need to constantly refresh the website).

KyberSwap

KyberSwapis another decentralized exchange, but just for Ethereum tokens (at least at them moment of writing this). It is based on the Kyber protocol, which allows fast and direct swaps of tokens (for example BAT=>KNC) without the need of exchanging first to Ethereum and then into the desired token. There are already quite a few dApps built on the Kyber protocol, you can see a list here. Recently, KyberSwap launched a nice and easy to use iOS app, which supports also a price alert feature (USD and ETH base pairs only, however).

Trust Wallet

Trust Wallet, the official non-custodial wallet of Binance, has a good reputation when it comes to storing your HODLs. It is available for both Androidand iOS, with a desktop version being worked on. They are constantly adding new coins, and the usage is even for new users pretty easy. Their Telegram support group is always just a message away in case you need some help.

MyEtherWallet and MEWConnect

If you want to perform advanced operations (like cleaning pending transactions or getting your *.eth address), there is a big chance that you will be able to do it with MyEtherwallet.

They recently launched a newer version of their website. However, not all functionality has been ported over (yet). If you cannot find an option on the new site, you will find it for sure at their vintage site. The most secure way to connect to MyEtherWallet is their MEWConnect app (available for iOS and Android), which transforms your phone into a hardware wallet-like device. You need to confirm transactions on the device before you can move on in the browser, adding in an additional security layer.

Etherscan

Etherscan is the best known Ethereum blockchain explorer around. It has tons of features, from viewing transactions or contracts to token details and ENS-Lookup. Whenever I need to verify or search something related to the Ethereum blockchain, this is my first goto-address.

O3 Wallet (NEO)

If you are searching for blockchains built with .NET, sooner or later you will run into NEO. I only recently began to explore the possibilities of the NEO blockchain and its native currency. NEO has a token ecosystem as well. IF you need a cross-platform wallet, I would give the O3 wallet a try. It integrates with Switcheo (another decentralized exchange) and quite a few other dApps (like registering your .neo address via NNS) running on NEO.

New projects

The crypto space never stand still. New projects are showing up almost every day. Here is a list of projects I recently started to discover. It is way to early to write a review on them, but I may do so in a follow up post.

  • WolfpackBot (beta, crypto trading bot running on its own blockchain)
  • Bravo (write reviews, receive crypto)
  • Switcheo (decentralized exchange for NEO and ETH tokens, EOS soon)
  • Electroneum (mobile (cloud) mining on its own blockchain, use 5576A9 to get a 1% bonus on your mining rewards (5% for me))

News Sources

It is always good to know what is going on in the crypto space. Here are some reliable news sources I use:

Conclusion

Besides the hundreds (if not thousands) of gambling dApps across all blockchains, there are also interesting real word projects one can use today. Some of them are more popular than others, but not every project is worth your attention. This post showed some of the projects I am interested in.

If you know a project/tool/dApp that is missing in this list, feel free to leave a comment below or ping me on social networks. Maybe your suggestions will make it into the next post of this kind.

Disclaimer: I am contributing to one or more crypto/blockchain projects with code written by me under the MIT License. Future contributions may contain their own (and different) disclaimer. I am not getting paid for my contributions to those projects at the moment of writing this.

Please note that none of my crypto-related posts is an investment or financial advice. As cryptocurrencies are volatile and risky,  you should only invest as much as you can afford to lose. Always do your own research!

Title Image Credit

Posted by msicc in Crypto&Blockchain, Editorials, 0 comments
30
Dec
2018
2018 in review – Focus on Xamarin, RIP UniShare, the rise of crypto and blockchain

2018 in review – Focus on Xamarin, RIP UniShare, the rise of crypto and blockchain

This year, I had some rough time to keep me motivated on writing blog posts. In the early months, I was keeping my target to write about Xamarin Forms and my implementations, but I slowly lost pace around the summer.

Xamarin posts

Within the first half of the year, I was keeping a pretty constant 2 week frame for new blog posts, targeting Xamarin and Xamarin Forms. I touched several topics (some of which may be obsolete since Xamarin Forms 3.x). Here is a short recap:

The rise of crypto and blockchain

Since 2017, I was loosely following the area of crypto currencies and blockchain. This year, however, marks the beginning of a deeper dive into the blockchain area – and of course also into crypto currencies. I am not advising anyone to invest any money into crypto currencies, but there are certain projects out there that are really interesting. Two of them are social networks, similar to Tumblr: Steemit and Trybe. While Steemit is running on its own blockchain, Trybe is utilizing the EOS blockchain. Sadly, the .NET world seems to be widely ignored, so I stepped down a bit from posting on those two. I also tested several other networks running on or with blockchain, but none of them took me like the two mentioned above. If you want to learn more about the crypto currencies/projects I am interested in, just head over to my crypto page.

Open Source

Even if I did not made a lot of sound around it, I have worked on some libraries this year. I am not going into detail on every one, just head over to my Github:

I am currently working on another library (targetting crypto payments) – I will write about it once it is ready to be used in your projects.

RIP UniShare

One of the sadest moments this year was the death of UniShare, my most popular Windows (Phone) app. Long story short, due to some changes Facebook made to their API, I had to take UniShare to its funeral at the end of October. Read more about it here.

Looking forward to 2019

In 2019, I will continue my journey within the crypto/blockchain world. Like I wrote above, I am working on a crypto related project at the moment, which I hope to have ready in the early weeks of 2019. One of my other projects, WindowsUnited, will be taken over by another developer in 2019 (because he can invest more time into their official apps and work form them more ore less exclusively). This will free up some recsources, which I am trying to invest in my other projects and the rise of my blogging pace (again).

Thanks to all of you for reading my posts this year. I hope you’ll be with me in 2019 as well. I wish all of you a good arrival in 2019 and a happy new year once it arrives.

Until the next post, happy coding, everyone!

Posted by msicc in Editorials, 0 comments
31
Dec
2017
Saying Goodbye to 2017 [Editorial]

Saying Goodbye to 2017 [Editorial]

First Half

The first half of the year I wasn’t much into development besides work. I was asked to help building a new German Android news site, which turned out to be an impossible task because of several reasons (high author fluctuation was the baddest thing). In the end, the owners decided to go another route by turning the side into a a site dedicated to Chinese hardware, which is an area I do not have a lot of trust and interest. So I decided to step out of the project and focus again on my software development efforts.

Back to software development (Second Half)

The first thing I was focusing on in that area was to get deeper into web development with ASP.NET Core. I learned a few basics from Pluralsight and started to work on a project that I will (hopefully) bring forward in 2018.

I also got back deeper into cross platform development with Xamarin, especially Xamarin.Forms. As Microsoft killed all mobile efforts in the UWP, this step was one I denied way too long to go. As a logic step  I started with my ongoing series of blog posts about Xamarin Forms and the MVVMLight toolkit. If you missed it, here are the links to the posts:

During the first 8 month of the year, I was running Android as my daily driver. However, I never was really happy with the Android OS (and I am still not), so I decided to switch to the iPhone 8 Plus after its launch. I detailed the reasons why here:

Why I am (once again) using an iPhone [Editorial]

In the last month, I was also looking into some IOT development, and this is were my current focus is. In the next few weeks I have a private project that overlaps with a project at work. I really appreciate it when I can be productive in multiple ways, and those (sadly rare) overlapping projects are just plain awesome to work on.

Private things…

Having a look at my private goals (for those who care), I started with some functional fitness workouts in late summer. I am using the workout app from Skimble, which has some handy video guides and is way cheaper than a gym subscription. In 2018, I want to move on to get even more fit. On top, one of the biggest (and probably hardest) goal is to become a non-smoker. I am hoping that being more active has motivating impacts on the later goal as well. On top, in the last few days I had my first baby steps into meditation as well, but I am still struggling with that one. So, way to go in these parts of my life.

Well, this post is not as long as the ones of the years before, but I really already told you everything that happened this year. To close this post, I wish you all a happy end of the year, an awesome party tonight and I hope to welcome you all again in 2018 here on my personal blog.

Happy new year, everyone!

Posted by msicc in Dev Stories, Editorials, 0 comments
29
Sep
2017
Why I am (once again) using an iPhone [Editorial]

Why I am (once again) using an iPhone [Editorial]

If you have been following along me for some time, you’ll probably know that I used to be a fan of Microsoft and its products (especially Windows Phone) for a long time, and I did really everything possible in the Microsoft ecosystem and promoted it whenever I was able to. Three years ago, no one – not even me –  could ever think of me using anything other than a phone with a Microsoft operating system on it.

Microsoft has changed…

The Microsoft a lot of us used to love is gone. It all started to become really bad for Windows Phone/10 Mobile when Steve Ballmer left the building (aka stepped down as CEO). He was the force behind all mobile efforts, and I think Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile would still exist with shiny new devices. However, Mr. Nadella is now the CEO of Microsoft. And as he stated recently in his book (“Hit Refresh”), he never understood why there should be another mobile OS besides iOS and Android (we all know duopoly is as bad as monopoly). All of his actions in the last few years, starting to burn out Nokia from Microsoft and also killing Windows 10 Mobile (even if he never would state that publicly), make sense after knowing this. Nadella’s Microsoft is a business oriented, cloud focused money machine with no more consumer love. Sure, they still have products for the consumer like Groove Music, but they do lack their consumer focus which we all enjoyed when Windows Phone started.

To sum it up, times have changed. The first steps outside the Microsoft ecosystem happened quite some time ago, you can read more on that topic right here:

Editorial: Why the app gap on Windows Phone/10 Mobile is a bigger problem than I thought

After that, I used and reviewed some Android devices for a German news site, and got back into the Android ecosystem by putting some apps (at least as beta) into the Play Store. After more than one year on Android, I see that fragmentation is still the biggest problem out there. It makes developing apps for it a mess, as there are tons of devices that do not behave like you expect when developing with a Nexus or any other plain Google device.

Software updates

Another point which is quite important, is the actuality of software updates. Due to the fragmentation problem and the ability for OEMs to change the whole user experience on Android, this has always been a problem. Google tries to address this problem with the latest Android Version Oreo, but this will not help with all those existing devices on the market that are running Marshmallow or Nougat. Even this year’s flagships are not able to catch up and profit from the new way to handle software updates. I do see a chance that this will change over the next year(s). However, this makes me to not want to spent any money on a recent Android device.

Google’s Pixel (and at least their Nexus 5X/6P) devices are certainly well built, and have a guarantee for getting the latest software updates first. However, they do not want to make me spend my money on them (not even the rumored second incarnation).  Then there is Samsung, which makes premium devices, but my experience with their smartphone has always ended bad – not only for myself, but also along my family and friends.

iOS however is kind of similar to Windows (Phone). iOS devices always get the most recent software, including bug fixes and security updates, because of the closed ecosystem. Their hardware is always from top quality. Even if they are no longer innovating like they did years ago, all features they have are very well implemented. Also, Apple supports their older devices over a long distance, which makes an iPhone a worthier device to invest money in than any Android device – especially in those devices that try to play in the same league like Apple does in terms of prices.

What’s missing?

That’s the point where I was already heavily surprised when I switched to Android. The fact that all those official apps are available on Android and iOS, does indeed make a huge difference. Some apps do have Widgets (on both Android and iOS). Sure, they are no live tiles, but those that I am using do their job in a similar good way, even if I have to swipe to left or right to get them.  On top of that, all Microsoft apps are also available on these two platforms, and most of them do actually work a lot better there than they do on their own OS. So more than a year away from Windows 10 Mobile, I do miss… nothing.

In the end…

… this was a personal decision. I was evangelizing Windows Phone and all other Microsoft products for years, as some of you may know. As they do no longer offer a valid mobile device and are not even able to get close to what Android and iOS have to offer in their ecosystems, I cannot continue to do this. I was on Android for quite some time, but in the end, I decided to go back to the iPhone, which I left a few years ago – you already read the reasons if you reached this point.

Maybe some of you felt the same way I did when moving away from Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile? Feel free to start a discussion here in the comments or on social media.

Until the next time, have fun!

Posted by msicc in Editorials, 0 comments
13
Aug
2016

Editorial: Why the app gap on Windows Phone/10 Mobile is a bigger problem than I thought

Note: as this is an editorial, this blog post reflects my own experience and thoughts. You will agree with some points, but disagree with others. Feel free to leave a comment to start a discussion below.

Recently, I received a Nexus 5x as development device for a project I am about to start. As tech enthusiast, I could not resist to start using it as my daily driver.

As you might guess, I started with an install orgy of all the apps I am using on my Lumia 950 XL and set them up. It may be surprising, but I immediately recognized huge differences between the platform versions.

Take the Facebook app for example. Animations are smooth like butter, almost all settings are in app instead of leading to a mobile page, even loading content and scrolling is a whole lot better than on Windows 10 Mobile.

Another example is the Path app. Never been updated since its launch on Windows Phone, I was truly surprised when I opened It on Android. It is an app that really is fun to use on Android. I bet they would have a lot more users on Windows if they align the app… sadly, they abanonded the platform completely a few month ago.

The last example is the WordPress app. It exists on Windows (Phone) for existing users, but the experience on Android is galaxies away from the one the one in Windows (Phone) has/had. I am even writting this post with it, because it feels just right to do this (I only did that once on Windows Phone).

These were only three examples, but they show pretty much how different official apps can be between platforms (and how they are supported). And they all show, that Windows really has no priority anywhere (sadly).
The quality of apps that are available on Windows is not all, though. Of course, I downloaded also some apps that aren’t available for my Lumia 950 XL as well. And it does make a difference.

On my Lumia, I often use the mobile page for things to do/achieve. On Android, I have a whole lot more apps to choose from, so I never had to open the browser for:

  • my mobile carrier
  • my landline & tv carrier
  • the communal page of Winterthur (where I live)
  • swiss auction page of ricardo.ch
  • swiss page tutti.ch
  • Amazon (Bonus: the apps are connected, needed to log in only on one and all others had my account)
  • eat.ch, a swiss food order service
  • Imgur
  • Giphy
  • and more…

Some say a good mobile page is as good as an app. That’s wrong for most cases. A good written app is always handier than a website. On any platform (at least in my experience).

Android app quality has improved a lot in the last two and a half years (that’s how long it took me to deeply test the OS and the ecosystem again). They are equal to the high level on iOS (which I saw also recently, as my son broke out of the Windows world I created at home).

On Windows, we have a lot of third party apps that are trying to fill the gap. I respect those developers (at least those that use legal, public APIs), but it is just not the same. And even on Android (or iOS), there is room for third party apps besides the official ones.

The Android OS itself feels also grown up, and it is difficult to say if iOS or Android are better. It is more a question of who you prefer – Google or Apple.

Microsoft’s Windows (Phone/10 Mobile) is on a good way to get on par. Lots of the functionality is also there. But… as long as the provider of a service, no matter which kind, do not use them (for whatever reason), Windows will never grow up. The Universal App approach is a good idea, and it may pay off one day – or it may be too late already. The recent switch to focus on enterprise users does not really help. Because also enterprise users tend to have only one device. And also enterprise users tend to use apps on their mobile device.

As a WinPhan, writting this honest post deeply hurts. Even more, as I really am thinking about switching platforms for mobile things. Not as a developer, but as a user (at least until Windows has grown up).

Posted by msicc in Editorials, 4 comments