Starting my new Surface Duo app: “DuoBahn”
Winter is coming! At least it seems that the temperatures drop. What a perfect timing to start into my summer holidays. Yay. Anyways the German gouvernment launched an open data intitiavte called bund.dev (‘bund’ means “federal”). How neat. Let’s work with it!
What is bund.dev?
Under the title “We document Germany”, quite a few freely publicly accessible web interfaces have been brought together here at the federal level.
The portal describes them as itself (Translated):
The federal API portal contains documentation on programming interfaces of federal administrative services and information portals. The number of interfaces available online will grow significantly by 2024 as part of the “Act to Amend the E-Government Act and Introduce the Law for the Use of Public Sector Data” (2nd Open Data Act).
In addition, quite a few OpenApi specifications are available for download on the GitHub page of bund.dev. If you want to stay up to date you can also follow the portal on Twitter (@bund_dev). Unfortunately, I haven’t received an answer to a tweet yet.
Back to the app: What exactly is it about?
No idea. The app is still completely in its infancy. Every idea is welcome. So far, the idea is to display information about highways selected by the user. Of course I am bound to the available data of the API.
The following information is available:
- Traffic news
- E-car charger
- Closures
- Road works
- Webcams
- Rest areas
You can already see that this app should be designed with a very strong focus on maps.
Unfortunately, it will probably not be possible without an external helper to pull all the data of all highways. It seems like I ran into rate limits here in the first tests. However, I feel that this is not really a blocker, even from the customer story, since you are usually only interested in certain highways. This can also be a complete misjudgement. From this, a selection of the desired highways from the user of the app is to be planned in the design.
First graphic ideas
Even though I am not a designer, I like to have something in front of my eyes where the journey should roughly go.
For this reason, I’ve come up with an early draft of the DuoBahn app’s interface based on the official Surface Duo design kit as well as the Material Design kit in Figma.
Whether any part of this concept idea will eventually find its way into the final developed app is uncertain, but it still gives me a sort of guide to shimmy along during my free time development session.
No MAUI again
After abandoning the migration of our Dr. Windows #rTsd Surface Duo app, my plan was to develop the next leisure activity in the new .NET MAUI context. Due to several delays as well as the late release of Visual Studio For Mac 2022 — in the corresponding year — this plan has now changed. In addition, I personally feel that MAUI is still too fluent in the form of breaking changes and that there is no real documentation for beginners, since there are now several preview versions and some things are already very different.
In general, this is acceptable since I only want to use the Microsoft Surface Duo and therefore don’t really need the “Write Once, Run Everywhere” functionality of MAUI.
Why no Flutter or ReactNative?
I finally decided not to use either Google’s Flutter or Facebook’s ReactNative because not only is the support for foldable devices behind schedule, but I also don’t own the ReactNative tech stack and have no ambition to try it out, let alone support it.
What’s next?
The days are getting shorter, the nights longer, so the nerd becomes a keyboard banger. The project is still at the very beginning. There is still a lot of trial work to be done before we can “officially” start with the actual development.
But this has the advantage that we can discuss about possible features of the app.
What features would you like to see? Would you rather use the app with two screens side by side or one on top of the other?
What choices have you made so far, such as Xamarin.Forms, would you have made differently?
I look forward to your comments!
Translated from the my original and upcoming Dr. Windows article with www.DeepL.com/Translator
