About time for an update. I’ve been busy migrating JyotishTools Pro from a Xamarin project to a .NET MAUI project. Both are Microsoft cross platform frameworks but Xamarin has been no longer in support for over a year. There was no problem doing an update last December but to update an iOS version required it using MAUI. And that has not been easy.
Most of what is called the “backend” code remained the same but it was the UI that changed and for convenience most of how we handle things specific to a platform (Android, iOS, Windows) was rolled into the main project. IOW, MAUI became more of a cross platform player than Xamarin was.
However, like many developers who had made apps using Xamarin have been displeased with MAUI. Stuff got broken that wasn’t broken in Xamarin. Big for Pro was the carousel page that Xamarin used. According to Microsoft that paging system was a hack so made it unavailable in MAUI and we were force to replace it with using a carousel view. Which didn’t work exactly the same as a carousel page. Fortunately one of the Microsoft MAUI team members thought the old carousel page was quite useful so wrote a tutorial about how to make the carousel view work similarly. I was able to get the view (used only on Phones) work somewhat as it did before.
As for iOS the December update was less urgent so the MAUI version of Pro will be available on iOS and maybe even for the first time Macs.
In the process I ran into a problem no one reported (or didn’t describe it correctly if they did) and that with the Windows version on Windows 11 the window when maximized may not stretch the charts vertically to fill like it does on Windows 10. This seems to be an oversight by Microsoft engineers who lately just think in terms of mobile (where you can’t resize anyway) and not desktop. I know (as well as does Microsoft management) the UWP interface wasn’t that popular so it has been replaced with what is called WinUI which is better for desktops but still doesn’t look like a Microsoft business app which I think some of you wanted (like the out-of-date JyotishTools for Windows).
Also in the forthcoming update is a new atlas search where you only need to type in the name of the city and maybe the state to narrow things a bit. It should be much easier to use.
The new atlas will also be part of a forthcoming Bhrigu Nandi Nadi app you can take with you rather that have the Internet handy. BNN has been very popular and gets more visits for that than anything else here. I am thinking of adding a “community” here for discussions on the apps and the techniques. Regarding BNN I have noticed that YouTube has added “dubbing” of some videos using AI in multiple languages. It’s not perfect though.
That’s about it for today. Have a great summer star gazing!