Hey, everyone! A new ComplimentMe update has been released, and there's more to it than you might initially think. You see, while version 2.1 might seem like a pretty minor improvement over 2.0, it actually involved me rewriting a decent bit of the app's code. How come? In this post, I'll be going over how I nearly lost ComplimentMe forever and what it took to bring it back. Without further ado, let's begin!
Our story begins with a stupid mistake...
A while ago, I was trying to free up some space on my laptop's boot drive. I found a directory that was an old backup of a bunch of my projects. At the time, I was pretty sure none of them had ever been edited, and I believed that they were all just out of date versions of them. As a result, I made the fatal mistake of deleting this directory.
A huge mistake.
It was mostly true that I had never updated any of the projects in that directory. There was only one exception: ComplimentMe.
When I later learned that I had deleted the most recent version of ComplimentMe, I freaked out. After searching everywhere, I realized that I had not backed up ComplimentMe in a very long time. This was an especially painful mistake, as I had made it a priority to always backup my Android projects over the last year. However, I apparently hadn't remembered or bothered to backup ComplimentMe in a long, long time.
Two options, neither of them ideal...
After some more searching, I managed to find a very old version of ComplimentMe from February of 2020. I wasn't crazy about having to rewrite most of what I had done in the last year to be able to release another ComplimentMe update, but it was either that or discontinue it. Those were my two options, neither of which were ideal.
Getting to work
After giving it some thought, I started working on bringing this old version of ComplimentMe to the modern age. This proved to be even more tedious than I had expected. This was due in large part to Xamarin Forms (the framework I used to make ComplimentMe) frequently running into issues and breaking. I had to restart Visual Studio countless times, and nothing seemed to work as intended.
However, I persevered and didn't give up. After hours upon hours of work, I finally made it to the end. The next release of ComplimentMe was complete, and the only things it was missing were some of the more recent compliment lists. Otherwise, it was more or less a seamless upgrade over the last release!
ComplimentMe 2.1 was ready, so I released it. That brings us to now!
Why bother?
After all of this, you may be wondering why I didn't give up or even tried in the first place. After all, ComplimentMe is hardly my most successful app.
To be honest, it mainly comes down the fact that I've become quite attached to ComplimentMe. In a lot of ways, it was my first truly unique Android app, and it was one of the impressive and complex Android apps I had made at the time of its release.
With all of this in mind, since I did have a way to bring it back and the time, I was determined to see this through. While it wasn't the most logical use of time, and it certainly wasn't easy, I'm still glad I brought back ComplimentMe. I definitely wish this hadn't happened in the first place, but it has taught me an important lesson.
Always. Back. Stuff. Up.
Even if it seems unnecessary at the moment, you'll never know when you might accidentally delete something. I was lucky in that I was able to save ComplimentMe, but I very easily could have lost it for good had I not still had that backup.
This has certainly been quite an adventure! I really hope you enjoy ComplimentMe 2.1, as I put a lot of time into making it possible. As always, thanks for reading, and have a great day!