Podcast Episode 170: Episode 143: Special Edition- Braden Cohen

Description

Special guest and member of our product team Braden Cohen joins Jon Edmiston on our RockCast today. Join them as they discuss the changes coming soon to the Rock Mobile framework, and upcoming version releases for both Rock Mobile and Apple TV for Rock. Show Notes: Documentation on Rock Mobile Apps: https://mobiledocs.rockrms.com/ Developer Resources on Apple TV: https://appletv.rockrms.com/

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to this special edition of Rockcast. This is a special edition because I'm hosting it. I'm Jon Edmiston, and today I have Brayden Cohen joining Hello. Brayden, thanks for being here. You've been on our team for eight months, and what have you been working on those eight months? I've been working a lot in the mobile world, a lot in the Apple TV world and doing some pretty cool stuff in there. Yeah. And so you work on our product team. And so that's some of the kind of newer or branch type technologies that have to deal with Rock and Spark. So that's a challenging place because some of these technologies are quite hard. Tell me a little bit about Rock Mobile. How hard was it that to learn? It was definitely a challenge. It took some time and it definitely took some grinding and just getting really into it and just trying to figure stuff out. That is in Xamarin and dot net MAUI technologies and those are both fairly new. Not so much Xamarin but the dot net MAUI side of things. Yeah. So tell me more about dot net MAUI. What is So that's the evolution of Xamarin Forms, which is what our app shell is currently based on. There's some pretty cool new stuff in there and some great performance improvements and it's exciting. So in Rock Mobile, we're kinda experiencing the same thing we're experiencing on on the framework side, on the regular core side, that we're changing frameworks. all technologies, unfortunately, they change. So we get new things. So MAUI is this new framework that we're moving to? Yes, correct. So since we're based on Xamarin Forms, it's not terribly difficult to move to .net MAUI. They brought everything from Xamarin Forms with them. Yeah, so that's pretty fortunate because having been on Xamarin Forms, Maui's the next extension of that. Mhmm. But it's really kinda cool because Microsoft's basically kinda went back to drawing boards and said, hey, we wanna be able to write apps across all these different platforms, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux. And so they said, We wanna create this new framework, so let's make this new MAUI thing. But Xamarin. Forms is actually a good starting point. And so they took from there. Because we had written in Xamarin. Forms, we kind of get to ride their coattails and it's not that big of a change. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. There's definitely still some changes and things to work through, but when it comes down to it, it is all mostly the same. So that's what you've been working on probably what for the last two, three months? Yeah, a lot of that in the last two, three months, especially heavy in the past few weeks. And what's the progress? How are doing on that? It's getting really close to the finish line. It's running on Android and iOS pretty seamlessly. There's a couple of the changes that we need to work around to make compatible completely with Xamarin Forms. Things look nearly if not identical when you come from Xamarin Forms to Maui without you having to change anything. So if I'm a Rock mobile if I have a Rock mobile project, what new things might I get? So there's some new new elements that are exciting. There's a lot of border control that really lacked in Xamarin. Forms. You get some really extensive shadows, which really lacked in Xamarin Forms. At the same time, there's pretty substantial performance improvements. So everything just feels a little bit more seamless. Cool. So a lot of new styling options for my applications. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So if I have a current app, , do I need to be afraid? Is it gonna work? Am I gonna have a lot of work to get it to this new platform? No. We're working on introducing a compatibility layer, which essentially makes sure that your app, if it's coming from Xamarin Forms, is in the best state for dot net MAUI. It does do some additional overhead. So we wanted to make sure you could turn it off and make apps completely in dot net MAUI, but it definitely makes it seamless. Okay. So this is kind of a little bit in the old days when we had the legacy Lava support. We had Lava, we wanted to change it to a new system. So I had the ability to kind of have this layer that would kind of fix my code for me. And then over time I just change a few things and then I can turn it off when I'm ready. Yep. Exactly. And I think since it's so content block based and driven, since we're narrowing it down to be able to turn it on and off per content block as well as application wide, you can really be only using it where you need to. Okay, so if I make a new page, I could make my new page fully just Maui and I don't have to turn on the compatibility for that page. Correct, yeah. And there'd be no performance overhead for that at all. Great, that sounds really cool. Are there any other changes that are gonna be in there other than the styling? In dot net MAUI? Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's some new animations that are exciting. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. We're bringing in all of the same ones that we had. We actually had a pretty extensive library to start with. So yeah, there's some new stuff. It's still really new. And so we kind of get to enjoy all the benefits of when they release stuff. There's gonna be some new some new Toast stuff in there. So toasts are a way of displaying messages, if something happens, you can put a little message at the bottom and Yeah. It looks toast coming out of a toaster from the bottom of your screen kinda. Yeah. Okay. I get that. Mhmm. So what's our release plan for for Maui? So currently, Shell v four is wrapping up. We're getting the last few things that we wanna get into there and then are gonna wrap that one up. After that, I think v five is gonna have some cool features that aren't in dot net MAUI yet. Don't think I can go too much in on those, but there's some exciting stuff for V5 that's already planned. And I think that we were planning on releasing MAUI for V six, which is hopefully fingers crossed around summertime. That's great. So v four is almost done. A few more bug fixes are going there, so we'll get that real soon here. And then there's gonna be another feature release, v five, the original framework, Xamarin Forms framework. And then now we have version six. Correct, yeah. So it's good, though, because we wanna talk about this now so that people can know it's coming, that if if you're die in the weeds technical, you can go out there and start reading about it and kinda get prepared. But we'll have it available in our Blue app. So if you wanna test your app, we'll have that available pretty soon. But you definitely wanna kinda keep posted for updates on on that. Mhmm. So that's really cool. That's a really big deal. Man, it's gonna feel so good to to have that. I know Maui has been out there kind of on our radar for almost two years. It's , , when they announced it and said it's coming and, , honestly, when I heard that, was , oh, really? We just got going on this. Now you're gonna change everything again. So it's really great that they they've really kinda kept to their promise of keeping it very closely compatible with Xamarin Forms. And it looks from the changes that you've shown me, the things that they did change, there's a logic to it. They're really trying to Xamarin Forms is a good thing, but they're trying to polish and clean up. It's refreshing sometimes, occasionally to see even a breaking change that Well, they're doing it for the right reasons. We get why they're doing it. So they're putting a lot of careful thought into that. So it's really good to have this behind our backs. But really, Rock Mobile is just one of the things you work on. What have you been doing in terms of Apple TV? So Apple TV, we're currently working on the v two release. There's some new pretty cool stuff in there. We have some new commands follow. You can pray for a prayer request within it and the ideas that you could do with that are pretty cool, I think. There's a lot of different styling commands so you can manipulate things on the screen. With that, there's a new countdown control. So you can count down to a live service per se Yeah, so I think it seems almost everybody wants is to have a live feed and some dynamic countdown to that. Yeah, and that's super powerful. And it's so easy to get a TV app going. It's Yeah, I think that's some of the good feedback that we've heard already is that some people who've kind of experimented with it were , Hey, had a pretty decent app going in just a couple of hours. If Lava and then you have access, of course, to the documentation that we put together. So you can put a pretty simple app together pretty quickly. So that's pretty cool. So we'll have version two out fairly soon. We just have to determine when are we done? There's enough cool features in there, I think, to say it's a good release, but we're always just kind of waiting for , when does it feel done? But I think it's really great. And I think if you look at it, you've only been here eight months, but you've already learned and tackled some of our hardest code, some of our hardest projects. That's kudos to you. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. It was such a relief too. the backstory a little bit of Apple TV is something that I was working on kind of almost as a hobby. It was almost done. It was probably 95%, ninety eight % done, but I just didn't wanna release it because I knew that it was all on me to fix things. And you came and learned that super quick. That's really is the reason why it was even released is because you had picked it up, you gotten comfortable with it. And so we knew that it was supportable now that we had someone else to kinda be there to answer questions and do the final little bit of fit and finish. And now you adding these new capabilities has been really great. So really appreciate that. Thank you, thank you. I mean, it was building on top of a project that was 98% done and it was really cool seeing how that is stitched together and how that works. I don't think that there's anything else that can build TV apps that. Yeah, it's really kind of fun. TVML is not really too bad to do, especially once you get used to it. Think the first, it's a weird thing because you start off going, I can do anything because you're just looking at the documentation and then you do it and you're , oh, this is a lot harder than it. Then I can do nothing. But then actually you get through that dip and you're , oh wait, okay, okay, I got it, I got it. So it's an emotional roller coaster I think. And I honestly think the Rock documentation for TVML is better than the Apple documentation for TVML at this point. Yeah, that's not really saying much is it? The Apple documentation. Again, you look at it and you're , oh, this is everything I need. Then you go actually to use it and you're , wait. This isn't. How does this work? I really do think if they polish up that documentation, more people might be able to do things with that. So we've tried to fill in those gaps where we could in our documentation and we give working pages and we've tried to make it easier. For instance, they have an app that you can use to see all the different types of layouts, but you had to run the app to get it. So we've made animated GIFs of what the app page looks . And then here's the TVML. So try to make it super easy. We try to make it a documentation that we would have wanted because we still need it. we we refer to it all the time. Oh, yeah. So lots of cool stuff. It seems in this space, there's really there's never a boring day. There's always something cool to work on and Apple keeps making new things and Android keeps making new things. Our project board is actually quite long of ideas. Just hard to get to them all. Yeah. And if they're not making something, they're breaking something. That is so true. Thanks Apple. Thanks Android. Or deprecating something that is needed and then it's up to us to figure out how to keep it working. But again, thanks for all you do. We couldn't do some of these projects without you. Again, eight months and you're already working at the level that you are on these projects is pretty remarkable. Thank you. That's really flattering and I love working on the projects that I do and I love working with Spark and it's awesome. Well, we'll call that a podcast. Thanks for joining us and just keep listening for all the latest updates on Rock Mobile and Apple TV. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.