ITWriting Blog

I am experimenting with Microsoft’s MAUI (multi-platform app UI) and have encountered various little problems. MAUI apps run on Android, iOS, Windows (WinUI 3) and Mac (Mac Catalyst), though in my case I am mainly interested in Windows and Mac. The application needs local storage and follows the mobile app principle of isolating this into a directory largely buried from the user’s view.

GitHub’s CTO Vlad Fedorov has posted apologetically about the 17th August outage which, he said, “lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes.

My attention was caught by the claim that Linux desktop use “surged to 22% on one workday.” Unfortunately the claim does not stand up to scrutiny. The figures are drawn from Cloudflare data and based on North America only. The 22% is there but only at 9:00 UTC, which is 4:00am on the east coast and 1:00am on the west coast, or in other words, when most of the USA is asleep. At 15:00 UTC on the same day, Linux share was down to 6%.

I am evaluating Microsoft’s MAUI (Multi-platform app UI) for use on a cross-platform project. I mainly develop on a Mac with Visual Studio Code. Setup for MAUI development is well explained here though getting everything in place for Mac Catalyst, iOS and Android is tedious. There is a tricky issue related to Apple’s Xcode, needed for MAUI for the Apple targets. Apple’s recommendation is that you install Xcode from the App Store.

One thing Microsoft is generally good about is keeping old applications running. Applications built with Visual Basic 6.0 (first released in 1998) still run well (in most cases) on the latest Windows. I maintain an application which is not quite that old, but which was built with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 2.0. It still runs but needs modernizing and taking cross-platform.

Although I make mistakes when I write, it is an activity that comes easily to me. Sometimes it is difficult: finding the best title, opening paragraph, closing paragraph, how to express a thought with the right nuance; all these things can be hard. If I know what I want to say though, the words come naturally and I have never felt the need for AI assistance. Nevertheless, AI can generate content, lots of it, and on the surface it is pretty good.

Vercel has previewed Scriptc on GitHub, a native compiler for TypeScript which is open source under the Apache 2 license. Scriptc takes TypeScript code as input and outputs a native code executable, along with an embedded JavaScript engine if needed, using the existing QuickJS ng project. The JavaScript engine is needed if there is code included that cannot be statically compiled, including JavaScript code, such as npm dependencies, or code typed as “any” in TypeScript.

Signing applications is a requirement for deploying a desktop or mobile application and can be fiddly. Microsoft’s Azure Artifact Signing always looked to me like a good solution in that the pricing is reasonable at $9.99 per month for up to 5,000 signings, and it is run by Microsoft so one would think that the certificates will be satisfactory for Windows users. This week I got started with the service.

Last week Moonshot AI introduced Kimi K3, with the promise that “the full model weights will be released by July 26 2026;” while Alibaba said on X that “Qwen 3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon”. These are capable LLMs (large language models), and the open weights promise means that developers will be able to download them from Hugging Face and run them locally.

Microsoft has released preview 6 of .NET 11, for which release is expected in November, including a big change to MAUI (Multi-platform App UI): it now runs only on .NET Core, rather than the Mono runtime. Principal product manager David Ortinau reports that “your app builds and runs on CoreCLR, the same runtime behind ASP.NET Core, your cloud services, and desktop .NET.” According to Ortinau, performance is generally faster than Mono on iOS and Mac Catalyst.