At the beginning of the month, I announced that I was working on a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app. However, as time went on, I started to realize that this just wasn’t going to work out. Today, I have finally made up my mind: I am going to scrap my first (and potentially only ever) UWP app. Why? So, what’s the problem with UWP anyway? Well, put simply, lack of documentation. With something like Windows Forms, there are a ton of resources out there, as it has been around for a really long time and has been quite successful. However, UWP isn’t nearly as old or successful as Windows Forms, so it doesn’t have nearly as much documentation. Furthermore, UWP is really sandboxed, which means that you have limited permission to access files. (You can’t just read/write to any file at any path) This is really annoying if your app needs to easily do this, as was true with my app. Finding ways to work with these limitations is a lot harder without much documentation on the internet. What next? Obviously, killing this project off means completely changing my plans for this month. Thankfully, this shouldn’t be too difficult. This is because I have already started working on a new project! This time around, I’m going to be using Electron to make my next desktop app. This means that it will essentially be a glorified web app! That’s all I’m going to share for now, but I have a feeling that this will work out much better than UWP. As always, thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more updates! |
About a year ago, I reviewed the 2014 Mac mini on this blog. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that it was still an excellent machine for productivity tasks, but it could also handle some more intense things you threw at it. Thus, it became my daily driver up until I upgraded to a 2017 MacBook Air a few months ago. That being said, I’ve still been using it some, so I thought I’d briefly share how it’s holding up these days. Here are my thoughts on this miniature Macintosh one year later! Performance Over the last year, I’ve been impressed by how much this Mac can handle. It’s rocking a 2.6 GHz dual-core Core i5 with 8 GB of RAM and a Samsung 860 Evo 1 TB SATA SSD. What all that jargon essentially means is that it’s a moderately powerful little computer, although it certainly isn’t going to put newer Macs to shame. Regardless, I’ve been able to do lots of coding, video editing, and schoolwork on this computer, and it has generally worked pretty well. Granted, it can take a while to