So I wasn't imagining it Tuesday night when I was on the iBooks store. The Apple Store was having trouble.:

Problems began around 12:30 p.m. Eastern time and are still ongoing as of this writing, according to the company official system status page. Affected people are unable to access the storefronts and/or prevented from downloading content, such as app updates, even though just the iTunes Store is listed as being down.

That wasn't much fun. Course I kept hitting `Get` (<<< strange; DeskMD didn't notice the `'s for code there) for Apple's book on Swift because it acted slightly differently with each press, so I thought I might just have to find the proper sequence of events to get it to pop out. Shake the machine!

Not exactly an Apple Fail, but I don't know that Amazon's done this to me, and I've hit a few downtimes with Apple (and, to be fair, Gmail).

Still getting used to what I can and can't do in DeskMD. Looks like the font scales to the window size, so though I can't see much now, at least it's not billboard-sized on my iMac screen. File a few bugs. We'll see. Very mvp-y, as I said before, but I'd already gotten to the point that I was using a Markdown editor to edit, export, hack out `body` and `head` tags, and post via blogger.com, so this cuts out lots of middlemen.

In other news, I've been listening to Jason White's appearance on the Gone Mobile podcast, and he was serious enough to make me take another look. I think I'm finally over the tipping point, thanks for a confluence of events...

  • I got a year's free subscription to Xamarin for Android and iOS for being a Windows Phone app developer that'd released an app.
    • (Talk about lucky. If I'd made my first test app in iOS or Android, even using Xamarin, I would've lost out.)
  • Visual Studio 2015's free version now allows for extensions, and developing for Xamarin is handily baked in.
  • I learned enough XAML in my Windows Phone app that I've Stockholmed myself into liking it.
  • I bumped back into the Xamarin Android Player, which is very fast, relatively speaking.

So full use of Xamarin Forms is now "free for me", I'm much more used to the technologies than the last time I checked, and it seems to be fairly mature. And Xamarin Forms does work very well for that first 70% of what you'd like to do. Great for puking out quick apps, which I supposed I should do next. I like it. Maybe I will build a crappy podcast app after all. At the very least, I could have much more complex rules for playlists than what I get now, and maybe even sync where I'm at in 'casts across different app platforms.

What I might like best is that I can stop pining away for a new MacBook. If I can use XamForms for lots of what I want to do, well, I can keep up my development on my Lenovo using the Android Player. Nice.

But man, in this episode, Greg and Jonathan aren't scared to ask the tough questions, pretty consistently asking for your worst mistakes and decisions where you'd like to take a mulligan. I don't remember them being so pointed before. But it's clear it's not personal, and makes for a much more interesting listen.

Argh. I'd already forgotten about DeskMD's p-tag around li-tags bug. Guess I'll just start doing those in raw html again.

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