I have had a couple of users email me saying that Ink Calendar does not open any longer. The app will show the loading screen for a while, then close. I had been confused because these crashes were not showing up in my app analytics tool AppCenter, then it happened to me and here is the fix!
Navigate to this folder:
C:\Users\<insert your user folder name here> \AppData\Local\Packages\40087JoeFinApps.InkCalendar_b262nqv4g3cq4\LocalState
And delete the file “Microsoft.AppCenter.Storage” (or move it to your desktop or somewhere if you don’t want to delete it)
Open Ink Calendar, now it should work fine.
This solution is much easier than manually backing up and restoring the app and its data. I am not sure why the AppCenter data is causing the app to crash or how this state occurs. Mostly I am just glad I figured out what was causing some users pain and I was able to fix it.
As Ink Calendar has evolved over the years it has become a surprisingly complex app. There are different flavors of complexity and different ways to expect and handle what is going on in the app. Some of the types of complexity found in Ink Calendar:
Date Time
Regional and language
File access and saving
Settings data validation
Memory leaks
Broken Windows APIs
Control formatting and layouts
Rapid control creation
Bad error messages
Overly simplistic feedback
Each one of these types of issues poses their own challenges to solve and catch before Ink Calendar crashes. Solving a single bug report can take a huge amount of effort and before the work begins it can be difficult to predict the amount of effort needed.
Data from users or Microsoft AppCenter crash reports is invaluable when it comes to making progress in a timely manner. So much of bug reports however end up being “Unspecified Error” or “The error message for this failure could not be found” etc. The best thing is getting an email from a users who has an error and working with them to get it fixed!
I am the only one working on Ink Calendar, so progress is limited by my time, but I am dedicated to fixing every bug I can identify! Please reach out via email or “Contact Me” on this website. I always love hearing from users!
I have been hard at work on the next feature version of Ink Calendar. This version is bringing Journals, a feature which many users have requested for a while now. Unlike the other calendar views Journals do not have dates and are not tied to dates in any way. There are a few different styles to choose from and offer the flexibility to make Ink Calendar work for you!
Journal Builder PageBullet Journal and Graph paper backgrounds
The app has been submitted to the Microsoft Store now all I do is wait! As always thank you for using Ink Calendar and it brings me so much joy knowing people use this app every day!
A couple of new features and bug fixes are rolling out in Ink Calendar 2.2.21. The features are focused on improving making Custom Views easier to find and jump to. Hopefully this makes them more useful for more people. For bug fixes this update focuses on syncing updates and making the multi-device experience more reliable.
Up next for Ink Calendar I will begin working on the most requested feature of Ink Calendar, more pages for writing.
Windows has a bug when it comes to the AppointmentStore API. Somehow the AppointmentManager gets into a bad state which fails to acknowledge new appointments, and fails to provide updated appointment information. This means when adding an appointment Ink Calendar has no way of getting that new appointment data back from Windows 10.
How does this affect you?
When adding appointments to Ink Calendar they will not refresh or show up even when restarting the app. Ideally this is the worst case, but in some cases this bug results in Ink Calendar crashing.
What is being done about this?
I have made a separate app to demonstrate the several bugs within the AppointmentManger API but Microsoft has failed to acknowledge these bugs. When submitting a crash report through the Feedback Hub when this issues was being demonstrated Microsoft dismissed the feedback and did not provide guidance or any updates.
A post has been made to the Microsoft Q&A website on how to best “refresh” the AppointmentManager to stop getting stale data, but no progress has been made there.
What will happen?
It is unclear if this bug will ever get the attention required to be fixed. In the mean time Ink Calendar should work and not crash, but will occasionally have old calendar data. I have experienced this bug on Windows 11 as well, so the fix is not on the horizon as far as I can tell. I will continue working to find a solution, but in the mean time feel free to reach out to Microsoft, file feedback, and let the company know how this bug is affecting you.
Thanks for sticking with Ink Calendar through this pain. And if you have a fix for this bug please reach out, support at inkcalendar dot com, comment below, or tweet at me TheJoeFin.
For the last several versions of Ink Calendar I have been focusing on fixing bugs. I am trying to do everything in my power to fix every single instance of crashing and performance issues. Watching every crash in AppCenter and doing what I can to understand and fix the root cause.
Stability ebbs and flows due to me rearchitecting the app to be more robust overall. One major source of crashes in the past month were related to me using a different system for triggering timers. This new system was the modern way of having reoccurring checks for new ink in the cloud and loading and syncing. I have since been able to refine my implementation and have seen crashes reduce significantly.
Another major area of focus has always been memory usage and the speed for views to load. With the next update (2.2.17) I’ll be rolling out a new cache method when switching between views. In my testing this new method is robust and reduces possible memory leaks from switching back and forth between views.
With any new addition like this the risk of bugs being introduced is high. However, the opposite is also very possible. Ideally with fewer objects hanging around in memory doing strange things Ink Calendar should be more stable. I test Ink Calendar on three devices in a variety of different ways. In addition to manual testing I write unit tests to ensure methods are robust and fault tolerant.
Hopefully you’ve stuck around over the years while I’ve been working on Ink Calendar. I want to believe the app has become a great app and delivers way more value to users. As always, I’m open to any feedback or suggestions. Just email support at inkcalendar dot com.
Ink Calendar is a hobby project for me. I work as a mechanical engineer for my primary income. I would love to be an indie Windows app developer full time, but it doesn’t seem like that is in my near future. I am frequently trying out new ways to get Ink Calendar in front of potential users. An easy way this can be done is use online advertising.
In early May of 2021 I launched a Google Ads campaign for Ink Calendar. The ad directed people to this blog InkCalendar.com where the “Get From Microsoft” button is right at the top eager to be clicked. I ran the campaign for 3 weeks and spent $179 for around 883 clicks and 55k impressions.
To judge the ads performance I used the stats from WordPress, and initially I was impressed… then I dug a little deeper. Here are the WordPress stats around the time of the ad campaign:
Week of
Views
Visitors
3/1/2021
74
44
3/8/2021
103
74
3/15/2021
102
58
3/22/2021
97
65
3/29/2021
86
60
4/5/2021
94
61
4/12/2021
180
103
4/19/2021
94
53
4/26/2021
80
48
5/3/2021
77
50
5/10/2021 (campaign begins)
308
350
5/17/2021
477
388
5/24/2021 (campaign ends)
495
390
5/31/2021
93
58
6/7/2021
116
58
At first look these stats are impressive! The weeks during the ad campaign had on average 6x more traffic! Exactly what I wanted! However I did notice there was not a similar increase in app downloads, so I checked to see if these new visitors were clicking on the link to get the app. Here are those numbers:
Week of
Views
Visitors
Store Clicks
% of visitors click
3/1/2021
74
44
10
23%
3/8/2021
103
74
21
28%
3/15/2021
102
58
17
29%
3/22/2021
97
65
12
18%
3/29/2021
86
60
11
18%
4/5/2021
94
61
15
25%
4/12/2021
180
103
17
17%
4/19/2021
94
53
13
25%
4/26/2021
80
48
11
23%
5/3/2021
77
50
7
14%
5/10/2021 (campaign begins)
308
350
21
6%
5/17/2021
477
388
19
5%
5/24/2021 (campaign ends)
495
390
15
4%
5/31/2021
93
58
7
12%
6/7/2021
116
58
14
24%
These numbers were pretty shocking to me. The weeks during the ad campaign had no significant change in store link clicks. In fact when looking at what percentage of visitors clicked the store links the ad campaign had terrible performance.
I am aware advertising for Ink Calendar is not the same as general business advertising. Plumbers or restaurants in an area use ads to win customers from their very similar looking competition. I’m still not completely sure what is going on with this or what to make of these numbers. But here are the things I know for sure:
I am no closer to being a full time indie dev
I will never use Google Ads to promote Ink Calendar again
A side anecdote, I would wake up around 6:00am Central Time and by that time there were already a large number of views to Ink Calendar for that day. The ad only ran in the US and the new traffic to this blog was also only from the US. I cannot understand why I’d have a couple hundred of view before the day had even begun. Very suspicious in my opinion.
Let me know what you think, either in the comments below or on twitter @theJoeFin
An updated was submitted to the Microsoft Store yesterday which contained a few key fixes bringing efficiencies to Ink Calendar. A newly discovered issue with Ink Calendar happened to be the way the Appointment Store was being used. Now I am calling a single instance of the Appointment Store which improves loading speed, memory usage, and appointment reliability.
There is more work to be done in this area and there are still strange behaviors with the Appointment Store API surrounding change notifications. I am trying to figure out what might be causing duplicate notifications when an appointment is added to the calendar.
Work to be done
I discovered today that adding appointments to the Windows calendar does not work well without an internet connection. Ink Calendar in the future will not enable appointment adding if the internet is not available. This should improve the experience as a whole because today the API simply fails with no warning or error.
Extra writing space has been a requested feature for some time, and it is a feature I have experimented with. Also adding text and hyperlinks to the canvas will eventually make its way to Ink Calendar.
Add images to your calendars alongside your inking! This feature has been on my roadmap for years. Finally I focused on the feature and got it working.
To add images to the canvas click the “Add Image” button after tapping the canvas
Add Image Button
To modify the images click the Enter Image button. Once in Image Mode use the mouse or touch to move and resize the images around the calendar.
Enter and leave image modeTwo finger move, resize, and rotate
In addition to adding images to the calendar, several bugs have been fixed.
Ink Calendar and Journal 