Cross Platform Thoughts

Cross Platform development for most mobile apps is just simply not worth it. Sure, there are great open source options like React Native and just plain C++ but you end up spending the same time trying to be clever and “share code” when you could have just built your product with all the platform has to offer. There seems to be a lot of realizations this year with Dropbox dropping their C++ components and last year Airbnb sunsetting React Native components. I’ve played this game before and while it was a great challenge, I would advise anyone not to do it for most cases.

Back in 2017 I joined the Highrise team as the Lead Mobile Engineer and one of the first decisions we needed to make was: what is the future of our game and how could we create it so that it could live on Android?

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I did some updates to my hugo theme, “Internet Weblog” to update support for newer version of Hugo. I realized I never gave it a meaningful version log so I hope I didn’t break anything for anyone using it. If you use it and see problems please let me know!

A friend said they were going to do Advent of Code this year and I thought, hey I should too! I’ve wanted to do it for the last couple years but always forget. Anyway, it started today and I just completed day 1. I decided to only use my iPad Pro with Swift Playgrounds. 😬

📚 I’ve been listening to the Hamilton book by Ron Chernow since we saw Hamilton the Musical last week. First, I hear the music from the show in my head while listening to the book and omg this book is long. Still 29 hours to go.

🎥 I saw “Bohemian Rhapsody” with my daughter tonight, it was good and Rami Malek knocked it out of the park. I’m pretty sure the entirer 3rd act was the Live Aid concert and I’m ok with that. 😀

Tonight I tried to design an app prototype on the iPad Pro using Marvel and Affinity Designer. I’m slow with the tools because they are new to me but it was really fun to think through a product without just jumping into Xcode or sketching ugly rectangles.

Thanks to the new iPad Pro and my iPhone X, I just spent a minute trying to swipe up on my test iPhone. I've already forgotten about the home button. 🙃

Like clockwork, I’m back to feeling like blogging again. First up to see if my microblog setup still works!

In writing some guidelines to how we use JIRA at Highrise, I wrote “It’s more about why we are creating this feature and less about being just a todo list”. We have too many tasks that are “Design This”, ”Build Thing”, and none that carry the idea that this is for a person from idea through design and developlement.