Saturday 16 May 2015

Upgrading from MVC4 to MVC5

So Googles login in feature broke in the standard MVC4 web app form M$.  The only option seemed to be to upgrade a few things.  In the end I made a new web app project in VS2013 and copied everything into that.  A couple of gotchas though.

  • Google Connect now requires HTTPS to work.  This meant getting a IP address for my web site and getting it signed.  HTTP seems to redirect to HTTPS without any hassle.
  • MVC5 now uses Bootstrap for all its responsive/CSS formatting.  This means you should probably recode your HTML a bit.  It looks much nicer than the old one though.
  • It appears to use new tables for storing its user admin data in.  
It took about a day of copying code and pages over from one solution to the other.  Not bad really.

Wednesday 18 February 2015

Mac App Store - an epic fail?

While the iOS app store is a great success, the app store for the Mac looks like a bit of a failure.  If you look at the free/paid charts and see what the most popular apps are you will see what I mean.

Lets start with the free one.  The top 10 apps are


  1. OSX Yosemite
  2. M$ Remote Desktop
  3. Xcode
  4. Unarchiver
  5. Memory Clean
  6. Slack
  7. Bit Defender
  8. Instragram
  9. RAR Extractor
  10. M$ One Note


That is an OS update, two M$ business tools, two zip utilities, Developer tools, a dubious memory cleaner and anti virus.  To begin with it implies most Mac users are business users who do most of their work in a M$ environment.  Zip utilities should really be standard with OSs these days, rather than an add on.  Then there is Xcode.  Does this mean that more people out there are developing new apps (for iOS probably) tun are downloading free apps on the Mac?

Then there are the paid apps.  I won't list them but in at #5 is Final Cut Pro, at £230 and at #8 is Logic Pro X at £150.  How low are sales if a £200 professional video editing app is the fifth most popular app?  we are talking niche market here.  Why would you even launch an app at £0.79 and how many would you need to sell to get to #180 in the paid list?

You can only hope those charts are summarised some how and not actually indicative of weekly or monthly sales figures.