Today brings us to about the third anniversary of active development. Looking back, though it has been a rich pleasure to be pursuing the goal of aiding you Elders as we serve Jehovah together, it has taken far longer than first envisioned. I hope you find and will find JwContacts useful and freely share your observations and suggestions.
Much of the last three months I’ve been deeply involved with feeding for a local LDC remodeling project, so new development has been at a decreased pace. Nonetheless I feel about ready to FINALLY release the iOS version. Although the Android and Windows UWP versions have been out for awhile in their respective App Stores, I held back on iOS because of a real issue with user note entry. The available Xamarin visual control would scroll downward at undesired times with no way to get back to the top. Recently one of the third-party vendors released a preview of a much more capable note editor, but it too had issues. I’ve been working with that vendor and, this week, believe the iOS version is where it needs to be.
Interestingly the new note editor still has an issue with older Android versions, but a fix is promised for next week. If so, I’ll release an updated JwContacts in all platforms. I’m also waiting for a different vendor to release (any day now) his 2020 controls version so I can see if any new offering ought to be incorporated into JwC.
Another major improvement is the addition of the My Projects data type. Working at the LDC site I realized it would be advantageous to be able to form ad hoc Project Groups consisting of any number of persons whose data exists anywhere else in JwContacts. Members could then be texted as a group, in whole or in part, and notations kept about the project and each member’s role. Likely I’ll add additional features in time. This has led to a database schema change that will require each JwC instance to go through an automated database update when the upgrade is installed. It would be best to back up all data first, just to be safe, especially since there were some minor changes in a few older data types as well. If you later re-import the backed up data, you’ll be warned it came from an older JwC version, but I’ve experienced no issues using such backups.
Minor changes: (a) Whenever there is only one JwC user, sign-in now requires just entry of his password; the username will be automatically filled-in. (b) The non-calendar screen to select a date has been replaced using a new date-selector vendor control that seems far more intuitive.
Major announcement: I have begun serious work on a multi-platform desktop version that will significantly improve desktop user experience over the current Windows 10-only JwC release. This became possible, as expected, when Microsoft released .Net Core 3.1 recently (which will be replaced by an even better .Net 5 in ten months or so). This programming framework allows code to work on both Windows (7 and 10, any version) and non-Windows Operating Systems (Mac, Linux, etc.) which conform to the embedded standards (as all newer Mac and Linux do). Installation should be a breeze if expectations are met: You would simply download a copy to anywhere on your PC and go. That does mean, though, to insure privacy, such a version of JwC will always have to encrypt all data.
For now I will refer to this in my postings as JwC-UD (universal desktop). JwC-UD can include additional features that could not easily be put in the other versions, such as an embedded Spreadsheet editor. You will no longer need a separate program (like Microsoft Excel) to compose initial JwC data. Windows does not allow its Store programs to send text; that hopefully will not be an issue with JwC-UD.
JwC-UD is being based on the same concepts as current JwC; much JwC code not dependent on the Xamarin framework can be readily copied into JwC-UD. The harder part is finding equivalents for the Xamarin controls (responsible for everything you see). My two major vendors both offer a plethora of .Net Core 3.1 controls, but in many respects there are no exact equivalents to those Xamarin ones JwC uses. Figuring out how to accomplish the same end goals with very different means will take some time, but should be doable. Stay tuned!
