New applications

In the last few months, I have been working on a bunch of new applications.
Feeling the itch to use all the AI credits I had available and to squeeze out the budget before it reset, I spent almost all of my spare time in April and May working on new projects or project ideas that had been lingering in my head for a while.

Now, in June, I decided to take a step back and slow things down for a bit after my wife complained that I was in my office non-stop. First home office, a short family time during dinner, putting our youngest kid to bed, and then back into the office to work on projects until late at night.

Anyway, that phase was very productive. Now I have one game in the stores, one game stuck at ~70%, another promising game at 80%, and a new process explorer.

I used these projects to experiment with different AI providers, compare their outputs, and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each to get a better understanding of the current state of AI and how to best use it in different situations (also at work).

One goal was to provide the infrastructure for the applications, define guardrails and basic rules for the AI, and then try to let the AI do as much of the work as possible. I still reviewed the code at a high level (architectural violations and such) and did the commits / PRs manually.

This worked quite well. I took the infrastructure bits from Mirroly (custom DI solution, logging approach, architecture, and abstraction levels), and the first task for the AI was to copy that code and adapt it to the new project.
I think the result was pretty good and helped a lot to get the project up and running quickly.

I feel like this approach also made it really easy for me to detect when the AI was taking a suspicious turn, as just looking at the code areas touched was already a super strong signal. I could then review the code and give feedback to steer it back on track. Basically, I treated the AI as a junior developer and tried to provide guardrails through the code architecture and basic design rules.

But now let me briefly talk about the released projects:

VØID Arc

Why most applications should be cross-platform

I know this is a hot take, and not everyone will agree. Some of you may even “strongly disagree” 😅.

Still, I want to make the case that most applications should be cross-platform - and that users should care about this too.

I’m biased and I admit it

First, I should be honest: I’m biased.

In two major ways:

1. I’m a Flutter developer. Of course I think that Flutter (or cross-platform development in general) is the right way to go for most applications.
2. I tend to switch platforms regularly. Android and iOS, macOS and Linux mostly and I hate it when I cannot use an application that I like on my target platform.

So yes, I have strong feelings from both a developer and user perspective.

Monitor Supercharge

You know, I’m a hardware geek and perfectionist. This is a very bad combination.
This already led me into buying plenty of Android phones because there was always something that annoyed me and I knew there was something out there that would do a better job in this particular aspect.

I think I have it under control much better now than in the past but it still hits me and my monitor story is a proof of this 😏.

What happened so far

As described here: Monitor progression I ended up using an Apple Studio Display and was quite happy with it.

Then came my switch back to Android and things weren’t as gold as inside the cage any more so I switched to a Samsung Viewfinity 5k monitor (see Testing old new waters with Linux).

This was also working quite nicely until I tried some gaming on my ThinkPad. The poor Intel IRIS graphics card was hopelessly overwhelmed by the 5k display and one could feel that it was not meant to drive that amount of pixels.

At work we have plenty of 4k displays (most of them from LG) and running macOS on them works quite well. My eyes are bad enough to not distinguish 5k from 4k to be honest 🙈.
BetterDisplay did the rest to enable HiDPI scaling on those monitors so everything was fine.

So I decided to go with one of the lower end LG 4k displays (LG Ultrafine 27US550 to be exact).

This worked OK in my setup and I was a happy man… at least for some time.
Looking at the MacBook Pro screen next to the LG didn’t do the LG monitor a favour…

The Return of the Mac

Maybe you remember my last post about my journey from a MacBook to a ThinkPad running Fedora …well, it’s over 😀

I really wanted this to work. I have put a crazy amount of effort into configuring my new beloved system exactly the way I wanted it.
I was proud to have this thing that I own completely. New OS distro to try out? No problem: swap out the SSD and run it. Don’t like it? Just install the old SSD again.
Also all the features that KDE comes with are simply crazy. If you imagine that this is being done by hundreds of people who just do that for the fun of it, or because they see some purpose in doing that. Crazy.
All the things that “just work”. I never expected that given my Linux experience from a decade ago.

What Worked

Most of the Things I Do on a Daily Basis Actually Work. at least, Kind Of:

• Browsing the web ✔
• Building Flutter apps ✔
  • Even for iOS (kind of - performance is really bad) ✔
• bash, Warp, Bitwarden, Affine, Seafile, Thunderbird, Vivaldi, VS Code, Antigravity, Android Studio - all work ✔
• Having Gemini in a Chrome App ✔
• Sending files with LocalSend ✔
• native Wireguard integration in KDE ✔
• having stats like network activity, CPU activity, … in the status bar ✔

Some Things Did Not Work but Were Solvable

• Having a Resilio Sync status bar symbol (vibe coded one) ✔
• Native GeForce Now app -> Chrome App (more on that later) ✔
• A good Git GUI (used Fork on a Mac, which is - hands down - the best Git GUI) -> switched to GitKraken. Not really fast and a bit weird, but does its job ✔
• Screenshot tool was really not that good. I use CleanShotX on my Mac, and there is nothing that even remotely comes close. I was about to vibe code my own (✔)

What Did Not Work

• MoneyMoney. I tried several Linux alternatives. But that’s just a pile of garbage, to be honest. There was that one application that kinda worked but it looked like a Java application from 2000 (maybe because it was 🤷‍♂️😂)
• Wiso Steuer. The tax software I use. There is no way that I would use a web based tax declaration service. I would rather install Windows into a virtual machine, and do my tax declaration in there.

An interesting ThinkPad twist

My Lenovo ThinkPad T14s story got an interesting twist that I never experienced before that led to me owning a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 now.

The original plan

I decided to setup a Windows partition on my ThinkPad in order to make use of my eGPU and play some games. Mainly Cyberpunk 2077 and Diablo 4.

I tried to run the games on Linux using Steam and Bottles which worked but especially Cyberpunk was a bit unstable.

The Unexpected Discovery

So I installed Windows on a dedicated partition and in the initial setup screen of Windows I was greeted with the Microsoft login dialog that weirdly showed the logo of a small German company and the proposal in the E-Mail field also ended with the domain of that bespoke company.

I’m not too familiar with the different enterprise setup options of Windows but I suspected that this notebook still was part of some enterprise program.

The plot Twist

So I contacted the seller and asked what the problem could be. He replied and said he most probably forgot to remove this device in the company’s management software and told me to do this the next day.

Testing old new waters with Linux

I was using a MacBook as main device at home since ~2019 and at work since ~2022.

For me MacBooks are a near perfect combination of robustness, ease of use and flexibility.
With the Apple Silicon transition Apple added performance, no fan noise and battery life to that already long list.

The macOS software ecosystem is full of really nice apps. From home banking (MoneyMoney) over system stats (iStatMenus) to awesome Git clients (Fork). All are perfectly tailored to the very limited set of variation that can happen in Apple land.

Then I decided to go all-in: Apple keyboard, iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad and even an Apple Studio Display and I was happily living the Apple dream 😀 (I left out the Apple Mouse. Sorry but everyone needs to have a line that is not crossed 😉)

Last year a few things happened: I got bored, Apple decided to use some really dubious arguments to get itself out of some EU regulations and promised AI things that were not even remotely finished (as it turned out lately they seem to have been caught off guard on that end) so I decided to go back to Android again.

To be honest: It felt wrong in iOS land for me the whole time. I’m an Android developer at heart and I think this won’t change that easily. It feels right to carry a device around that can contain the apps that I love most developing. Maybe weird but I’m sure there are some people out there that can understand me.

Replacing my iPad with a Samsung Tablet made the Apple Studio Display useless for the “tablet connected to monitor” use-case. Not that I do that very frequently but just knowing that this is not an option drove me nuts so I sold the Studio Display and went with the Samsung Viewfinity S9.

So at that point I was already half way out of the Apple ecosystem.

Since the beginning of this year I frequently ran into capacity issues on my M1 MacBook (512 GB) so I was seeking a replacement with more storage (and RAM, I had 16GB).
I quickly configured a M4 MacBook and immediately discarded that idea seeing the price. I don’t have CPU performance issues, I just wanted to increase memory and storage so I also had a look at used MacBooks that meet my requirements.
At that point I realized that it would cost me around 1600€ to do that upgrade.

Creating my first own iOS app

As teased in the last blog post I was testing quite a few music streaming services.

The problem

One problem I had, was to share songs that I liked with my kids. Yes, it happens from time to time that I like a song that my kids also like. More often than not, they don’t share my opinion on a particular song, but I keep trying 😅
The family completely refuses to switch to anything but Spotify, so I had to find a way to share songs with them that I found on other services.

The solution

There is that cool web service called Song.link that allows you to turn a music streaming service link into a link to a page that contains links to all the other services that have the same song.
Sadly they don’t have an app and only a guide for how to create a shortcut on iOS to use their APIs.
I found an open source Android app that provides a way to use the Song.link API to create these links. They did not offer a way to share the link to the overview page but was meant to directly turn the link of streaming service A into a link to streaming service B.
My first reaction was to fork this project and add the missing feature (including creating an upstream PR).

But I was not 100% happy with this app, so the expected thing happened that happens if you leave a software developer with a problem alone and give him a free version of GitHub Copilot: I started to write my own Flutter app.
This provided the perfect opportunity to create a quite small Flutter app from scratch putting GitHub Copilot to the test and to try out some new Flutter packages.

And back to Google Pixel

After a few months with my Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra I found a good offer and jumped to the Pixel 9 Pro.
I hope that this “oh this other phone looks nice, too” spiral that affected me a few years ago is not coming back, but I have a few good reasons for this switch 😅
Let me explain how I excused this switch to myself:

Size

Phones nowadays are big.
Much bigger than in the past. What is considered a “normal” phone was a “Max” 7 years ago.
Today’s “Max” phones (like the S24 Ultra) are huuuuge. The pockets of my trousers barely cover the whole phone and god forbid if you need to bend forward to close your shoes.
The only reason for me selecting the Ultra was the camera system. Sadly Samsung still only cramps the best camera they have to offer into the “Max” phone.

Big camera, “small” phone

Then - shortly after I bought the S24 Ultra - Google decided to release the Pixel 9 (what a surprise 😄).
This time they decided to give the “normal” Pixel 9 Pro the same camera capabilities as their “Max” variant.
I was jealous but resisted to immediately jump over to the Pixel.

Raving reviews

Then the reviews for the Pixel 9 Pro appeared.
Great camera, great battery life (for its size), OK performance.
The price for the Pixel 9 Pro (more expensive than the S24 Ultra at that time) was the only thing holding me back.

MediaMarkt offer

Then MediaMarkt had an offer: Pixel 9 Pro 256 GB for €949. Additionally, you get access to the Google trade-in program offering additional €150 on top of what they are willing to pay for an old Pixel phone.
So I looked into my drawer and decided that the Pixel 7 has to go 😀
The current value of the S24 Ultra (with some margin), the additional trade-in bonus, the value of the Pixel 7 and the MediaMarkt offer allowed me to switch without loosing money (I even made a slight plus but lost the Pixel 7).

A few updates

I’m still alive

It’s been a while since my last post.
The reason is really simple: there was nothing happening that I felt was worthy to share through a dedicated blog post, so I decided to not publish.
I’m still alive and still planning to share stuff on this blog.

dart-apitool updates

There were a couple of small updates for dart-apitool that were mainly driven by remarks or issues from its users.
A couple of changes:

Force flutter command

It is now possible to force dart-apitool to use the flutter command even if dart would work as well (if the package doesn’t have a Flutter dependency)
The new option to enable this behavior is --force-use-flutter

Default for --check-sdk-version changed

We realized that there is no situation in which changing the SDK constraints of a package leads to breaking consumer code.
Pub will make sure that any incompatible packages are excluded from the dependency tree resolution algorithm.
This means that a package that increases its minimum required SDK might not be usable by a consumer still using a lower SDK, but this consumer just continues to use the package that it used before.
Therefore, we changed the default for this option to off. At the same time we made sure that changing the SDK type is breaking regardless of the value for --check-sdk-version.

Add “missing exports” information to the extract command

Monitor progression

Ultra wide monitor

For years was using a 34” UWQHD monitor from LC-Power, LC-M34-UWQHD-100-C. It was a cheap monitor, but it worked, and it was very wide.

While really getting used to that horizontal space I also was not really happy with the overall quality (picture and build) so one day in 2021 I decided that I need to upgrade my monitor.

At that time I had my 13” MacBook Pro and while the resolution of the monitor was OK it was not really ideal for macOS. I had to use the 100% size mode which is a bit too tiny for my taste. But the next natively supported resolution was just way too big.
There were some tools out there that tricked macOS into rendering a too big picture and then scaling it down to the resolution of the monitor, but those tools need to create a separate virtual screen buffer consumed quite a big portion of my RAM, so I stayed with that 100% scaling.
I used a CalDigit docking station to only plug one cable into my MacBook and have all the periphery connected which I really got used to and didn’t want to miss in any new setup.

Then I discovered the Dell lineup of monitors and saw an Ultra Wide monitor exactly the size of the LC-Power (34”, same resolution, DELL U3421WE) but with much better picture and build quality.

The monitor also said that it has a docking station built in meaning I could get rid of that CalDigit as well, so I ordered one to test.

Once it arrived, and I set it up I was really happy with the picture quality and the overall build quality. The main issue was that I had to decide - in the on-screen menu - if I want to have a higher resolution / refresh rate or higher USB-C speed 🙁
The second - much more critical - issue was that the built-in network adapter seemed to not be compatible with our network system (AmplifiHD at that time, but that’s another story) meaning the moment I plugged the network cable into the monitor the whole network stopped working a few minutes after. This has caused quite a few complaints from family members until I found the cause of this issue 😅.

via GIPHY

Given that I was really happy with the picture quality and because there were no real alternatives (higher DPI) I decided to keep it and live with using the CalDigit Docking station for now.