Damian Mehers’ blog

I’m still developing my Ploze app (import your life’s history from a myriad of sources into an integrated searchable on-device timeline).

Since the start of this year I’ve been working on and off on the TV Tracking app that I wanted.

Intro I just got an Ubiquiti UNAS 2 - this is how I got Tailscale running on it, and got it set up to backup to a Windows SMB share via Tailscale by routing traffic to Tailscale via my UDM since the UNAS runs Tailscale in usermode.

For the last couple of years I’ve been working on an app called Ploze that lets you import data exported from a wide variety of services (Reddit, Day One, Skype, Twitter/X, Amazon, etc.) and present them in an integrated searchable timeline - everything s…

Oh no!

sqlite is amazing and Frank Krueger as gone above-and-beyond in creating sqlite-net.

I gave a presentation at GenTechies in Geneva, called Something is Happening with Headsets Augmented and virtual reality headsets are generating both massive excitement and skepticism, and of course, there’s a generative AI angle to consider.

In my FoodPhotoLog app I want to make the content searchable, but I don’t want the search field cluttering up the UI unless the user scrolls down slightly to expose it.

Great discussion with Leo Dion on his podcast talking about winding down Voice in a Can and the experience launching it and realizing its impact was more significant for some people than I first realized Podcast YouTube

I’ve made an app for logging photos of what I eat.

I’ve a TestFlight for a new app called Ploze that imports data from many different services and presents it all in an integrated searchable timeline. https://ploze.com

I’m getting reports for some new users that Voice in a Can (Alexa on your Apple Watch, Vision Pro, Mac and iPhone) is showing an Amazon error Key master exception and when I look at the logs I indeed see this: didReceiveResponse: http code: 500 and intern…

I like to build with warnings treated as errors, however sometimes this can cause unexpected headaches.

On macOS 14.2.1 (23C71), xCode 15.2 (15C500b) Reported as FB13541783 Consider this complete SwiftUI macOS app // // TestSearchStringInViewModelApp.swift // TestSearchStringInViewModel // // Created by Damian Mehers on 2024-01-15. // import SwiftUI @m…

Voice in a Can In 2018 while on my daily train commute I started playing with the Alexa Voice Service (AVS), which provides a network API to Alexa.

The GitHub issue I created for myself was Tap a photo to load it in Apple Photos.

I’ve read plenty of blog posts about Swift’s AsyncStream but never had a reason to use it to implement something myself until now.

I recently found myself trying to debug a most perplexing problem.

I’ve been hearing a lot of hot takes about there being no compelling VR experiences, so I want to share one in which I participate each week.

I’ve been banging my head against a wall trying to run XUnit tests on my Mac, for my Xamarin Forms app.

In theory when using a SwiftUI MenuBarExtra with the window style, you should be able to use scenePhase environment variable to detect when the menu bar button is clicked, and the window is shown.

What if you wanted to render a dynamic UI in SwiftUI, where you knew nothing of the view hierarchy at compile time?

If you give a Moose an Apple Watch, then they’ll want to use it to automate their Alexa smart-home.

I’m trying to convince myself that I’ve not really moved to Swift from C#, more that I’ve added Swift and SwiftUI to my repertoire, but I can feel my C# and .NET slipping away.

I’ve written several posts about using Xamarin to build Apple Watch apps, but I’m moving to Swift and SwiftUI for my watchOS apps now.

I’ve just put together a Xamarin Forms Stripe example app, based on their standard iOS and Android examples that let you browse products (Emoji), choose a shipping address and method, add and select a payment method, and purchase the product.

I have a list of items that I want order by frequency, so that var entries = ["one", "three", "one", "two", "one", "two"] becomes ["one", "two", "three"] I used the Swift dictionary grouping to do it: extension Sequence where Element : Hashable {

I wanted to be able to share a token between my macOS, iOS app and watchOS app so that I could login on the phone and be automatically logged in on the watch too.

I’m learning Swift and SwiftUI, and as part of this journey I’m working my way through Donny Wals’ excellent Practical Combine: An introduction to Combine with real examples!

This post is part of Luis Matos Code Snippets’ Xamarin Month In the early days of Xamarin Forms, if you wanted to use a platform-specific feature of a page or a view, you’d have to write a custom renderer.

I’m working on my third Apple Watch app built using Xamarin.

I’m inherently optimistic.

After spending a lot of time with AWS Lambdas, I’m exploring Azure functions.

I’ve been building Apple Watch apps using Xamarin for a couple of years.

I’ve been getting the error Error updating Xcode project on my Mac when trying to open a storyboard using Xcode in Visual Studio, by right-clicking the storyboard and choosing Open With|Xcode Interface Builder.

As with most of my posts, this is a message to my future self who will have forgotten everything I did today, to get my Xamarin Mac app notarized.

Instant rage I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it.

My current side/passion project requires the use of HTTP/2: It’s a .NET implementation of the Alexa Voice Service and I use it to drive Voice in a Can: Alexa for iOS, Apple Watch, Mac, Android, Android Wear, and … Tizen.

I have an app, called Voice in a Can, which lets you use Alexa on your Apple Watch and iPhone.

I picked up a new Samsung Galaxy Watch (SM-R800) today, and after spending an evening on it, I managed to deploy and run a Xamarin Forms (Tizen 4.0) app on it … I just tried the default template: In case it helps someone else, these are some of the things…

I’m looking for beta testers for an Apple Watch (and iPhone) app I’ve created that brings Alexa to your wrist.

This is a screencast I just put together showing how you can show your computer’s screen as an Alexa Smart Home Security Camera.

I have many Smart Home devices that can be controlled from my Amazon Echo, however none of those devices can be controlled from Siri on my Apple Watch or iPhone.

Supports segments of varying colors, radius and degrees, and supports data binding.

Resulting code is here

This is another of those posts where I am essentially writing a message to my future self to remind myself how to do something, and in the process perhaps help out someone else.

This is a small, simple thing, to make a Xamarin Forms DatePicker more friendly.

After many years of buying Mac laptops, I’ve bought a Dell XPS 13.