Improving the writing experience in 2.6!

Posted on by TheJoeFin

A new little lock icon has been added which when activated locks the writing canvas to make it easier to write without disruption. Windows tries to ignore other touch interactions like palms or bumps, but sometimes a manual lock is what is needed. I’ve always wanted this feature in OneNote for the same reasons so now I brought it to Ink Calendar and Journal!

Additionally I have improved the way items like image and text work with tap to deselect or tap to select. Hopefully this whole experience is better and more robust. Bugs have been found and fixed as well!

As always thank you for using Ink Calendar and Journal, and if you have any questions, feedback, or issues please reach out!

Joe

App hanging at launch? Here’s the fix!

Posted on by TheJoeFin

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!

  1. Navigate to this folder:
C:\Users\<insert your user folder name here> \AppData\Local\Packages\40087JoeFinApps.InkCalendar_b262nqv4g3cq4\LocalState
  1. And delete the file “Microsoft.AppCenter.Storage” (or move it to your desktop or somewhere if you don’t want to delete it)
  2. 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.

Let me know if this works for you!

Joe

Fixing Every Single Bug

Posted on by TheJoeFin

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!

Joe

Journals are in 2.3 and they are awesome!

Posted on by TheJoeFin

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 Page
Bullet 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!

Joe

Is Google Ads a scam for indie developers?

Posted on by TheJoeFin

It sure feels like it.

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 ofViewsVisitors
3/1/20217444
3/8/202110374
3/15/202110258
3/22/20219765
3/29/20218660
4/5/20219461
4/12/2021180103
4/19/20219453
4/26/20218048
5/3/20217750
5/10/2021 (campaign begins)308350
5/17/2021477388
5/24/2021 (campaign ends)495390
5/31/20219358
6/7/202111658

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 ofViewsVisitorsStore Clicks% of visitors click
3/1/202174441023%
3/8/2021103742128%
3/15/2021102581729%
3/22/202197651218%
3/29/202186601118%
4/5/202194611525%
4/12/20211801031717%
4/19/202194531325%
4/26/202180481123%
5/3/20217750714%
5/10/2021 (campaign begins)308350216%
5/17/2021477388195%
5/24/2021 (campaign ends)495390154%
5/31/20219358712%
6/7/2021116581424%

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

Joe

Fixes and Efficiencies

Posted on by 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.

As always thanks for using Ink Calendar!

Joe

Roadblocks to Fixing Known Issues

Posted on by TheJoeFin

Cover Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

I have been working on Ink Calendar since October 2017. Since then the app has grown to be much more capable and complex. When developing I expect there will be issues with my code, but as I have discovered there are also major issues with Windows APIs. In this post I plan to layout the issues I have been trying to fix for years with no success.

Ink Analysis Crash

One of the obvious hallmarks of Ink Calendar is the inking. Inking is different than traditional computer inputs like keyboard and mouse. A powerful inking experience requires quick selection and the ability to convert from ink to text. Lucky for me Microsoft makes this very easy with an API.

However this same magical API called InkAnalysis is the single biggest source of instability within Ink Calendar. My personal guess is this API is not heavily used because it has not improved or changed since I have been using it. Also Microsoft’s documentation on how to isolate the application from the InkAnalyzer does not exist. I have been working with the team to resolve issues; so far with no success.

Calendar API Errors

The other headline feature in Ink Calendar is the Calendar part. When users ink on a day and want to add that day to their Calendar in a more formal way there is a very easy API which can be called to add the appointment to the user’s calendar. However this API is frequently and randomly broken. No good feedback on a successfully added appointment. This means as a developer I have to guess if the appointment was added or the dialog was just canceled by the user.

Within the same AppointmentManager API is getting the user’s calendar appointments to show them on the calendar. This also is broken randomly and does not provide up-to-date appointment data. This completely prevents Ink Calendar from being able to provide a seamless calendar application. There is no clear way to connect with Microsoft regarding this issue and I have tried several different avenues.

Azure Pipelines

Building UWP apps and submitting them to the Microsoft Store should be the easiest Azure Pipeline that exists, but it is such a terrible experience there is no wonder UWP was never widely adopted. When users finally get pipelines working they randomly break with totally unhelpful error messages “internal compiler error.”

Does Microsoft Want UWP Developers to be Successful?

It doesn’t seem like it. When compared to other platforms like iOS and Android, UWP devs have no advocates within Microsoft. All of the recent developer and technology investments have been made last and worst for UWP experiences. Azure DevOps, AppCenter, C# language, .NET 5, are best when not developing a Windows GUI application. UWP is ignored and abandoned. Microsoft’s own 15 year old framework WPF has gotten more support than UWP.

I want to be an independent UWP developer, but as time goes on it becomes clear UWP is the bastard child of Microsoft.

Freezing and Crashing issues

Posted on by TheJoeFin

Finding and fixing bugs is a constant struggle with any software. It has been a painstaking process of narrowing down exactly what and where the bug resides in code. With Ink Calendar I group crashes into a few different categories.

  • File read/write
  • Microsoft Graph
  • Unspecified Error
  • null References

Recently I was emailed by a user who mentioned OneNote was unstable until they turned off ink analysis. So in Ink Calendar version 2.0.7 there is a new toggle switch to disable ink analysis.

Turning off ink analysis should help with crashes. If you make this switch and it helps please let me know. The ink analysis is a Windows 10 API, so if there is an issue, I’ll collect what I hear from users and reach out to Microsoft.

Other than analysis issues file read/write issues are largely related to the Microsoft Graph which does the cloud syncing. I can improve the cloud service, but some things are beyond the scope of Ink Calendar.

Finally null reference errors almost all come from getting appointments from Windows 10. The Windows 10 appointments API has some issues with not getting fresh appointments. Also there maybe intermittent access issues resulting in null references. There is a helper in Ink Calendar which checks to see if Ink Calendar has access to the user’s calendars. Even though this check runs before attempting to get calendar data, the data can still return null.

If you are seeing consistent repeatable crashes with Ink Calendar I would like to hear from you so I can get to the bottom of the issue.

As always thank you for using Ink Calendar and please feel free to email me (support at inkcalendar dot com).

Joe

Version 2.0 Work Slow and Steady

Posted on by TheJoeFin

The biggest feature request has been cloud syncing feature. With such a big improvement comes a bump to version 2.0. Also on the way with this release comes a refresh to the apps icon set.

The cloud sync plan was going to be a custom hosted cloud service. However, the best long term solution for every option is the Microsoft Graph. Ink Calendar 2.0 will enable users to login with their MSA and sync via OneDrive.

All of the symbols throughout Ink Calendar are being refreshed with Microsoft’s new fluent icons. They are natural and fit the natural shape of inking better than the previous symbol set.

Work is ongoing and hopefully be finished soon. While I want this release to be perfect I also needs to get into users hands to increase their productivity.

Joe