apedley

Its great they seem to be listening to you, they never really listened to me. F100 was brought about because they weren't listening, and the community had to do things they wanted because Xamarin weren't ever getting around to it.

I put a lot of effort into XF, and at the time, it was the best x-plat development environment (for my usage) around. But Flutter has really highlighted its shortcomings and I don't hold much faith that Shell is going to bring it to the front again.

A healthy ecosystem and easy bridging to native isn't a downside at all.

But this article is saying look how awesome XF is at all these pretty animations and functions, which are mostly done by other components or custom native code.

And they aren't quick and easy to implement either. But you then compare it to Flutter, and you could do most of it right off the Flutter SDK.

To me it highlights where XF lacks in a cross platform development. Especially when you think of the knowledge you have to know to bring in to use all these components. ActionScript, Skia, and each platforms native API usage.

I understand the need for some apps to work on desktops, but I haven't personally done any of these before. Just iOS and Android, is all clients ever seem to ask me. So of course Flutter wouldn't work well for desktop atm. But FYI: it is being looked at - https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding Even seen an MS employee contributing to it as well.

As for Dart, its similar to C# in a lot of ways and certainly is gaining traction. I didn't have any difficulty writing Dart code.

I actually half built a solution where the Flutter engine was running on Xamarin (hence coded in C#), and got a basic hello world app running. It does have the downfall of slower boot times and larger file sizes though.

But I abandoned it because its too big of a project for a one person side project.

This post actually highlights more of XF's downfalls than positives. I've been a big XF developer for years, and XF has many positives but this example just shows that they needed SkiaSharp, Lottie, and native platform code just to get their app out.

Not to mention the need for additional components such as horizontal scroll, carousel view etc.

If you look at Flutter, most of this app could be done with just the Flutter SDK. Haven't really played much with RN, so not sure how that compares.

If you see the chart just below the first one, the actual tax rate is roughly median with the rest of the world. The CBPP[1] article explains further.

While some countries offer low tax rates or incentives, they are to attract international business because they have no other means to attract them. The US is not like Ireland in this respect.

US companies have had record profits recently. The big tech companies like Apple are hoarding cash reserves. Why is giving them more cash going to change their approach?

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/actual-us-corporat...

The tax breaks for the middle class are only temporary. Most CEO's are praising them because it's great for them and shareholders. Most CEO's acknowledge they will use the additional profits to perform share buy backs.

While the middle class got something, the majority went to the wealthy, and as per my previous comment on shares, they are not going to be flooding it back into the economy.

Also US corporate taxes were about median for the world, they were not absurdly high, you should check out some countries in Europe for that.

Yes, it looks like they took a legitimate email, and added in that line causing all the fuss. That line is what seems out of place, and has the grammatical errors. The fact they mention Trillian also removes the legitimacy. Unless people are creating apps with an old school messaging service?

This email is completely unverified. Apple certainly has its targets on app generators, but not Xamarin, React Native or other similar technologies, that I have seen. The email contains grammatical errors and has not been received by any other developer, that I know of. It is highly likely to be a fake.

Great concept. One issue with the dynamically appearing forms is you don't know how long they will go on for. This will lead to people abandoning the form even though they may be 1 step away from completion.

Excellent. I love the progress Stripe is making with payment options.

So you pay a few hundred dollars and wait a few days to a week every time you sign up to an online service such as Pay Pal for them to read over the terms and conditions. The same with any Microsoft, Google and Amazon accounts? Did you get them to check over the Microsoft license or Apple license before you loaded your operating system on a computer you use for business?

My merchant provider is with my local bank. If you deal with a bank it suprisingly much nicer than dealing with merchants such as Amazon, Google or PayPal

You haven't run a small business before have you?

It's the easiest thing to do.

Thats the part that makes PayPal unbearable. As mentioned above I have had questions asked from my merchant provider over transactions but at no point did they freeze my account. They called me, sorted out the issue and my business kept running as usual.

Technically, yes :)

I would just recommend getting a payment gateway and merchant account. I am with eWay which only costs $350 per year + 50 cents per transaction. My merchant account costs a bit less per year plus a percentage of the transaction which is less than 50% of PayPal's transaction charge.

It takes longer to setup and I wouldn't really recommend them for micro businesses but they are certainly great for small businesses.

Thanks rquantz. It wasn't meant to be a hate piece on PayPal or anything else other than just my thoughts on what had happened and events surrounding it. As I updated in my article it was there to let my customers know what had happened and that it isn't such a big deal for businesses to move on from PayPal.

yes it is. I did look into it further once I received the email. My own fault for not reading the ToS throughly but I am not the only one who has been through it.

They are common for small businesses ($50K+ revenue per year into the millions) not so much micro businesses.

Trusts offer additional asset protection and tax benefits for business owners. Most accountants recommend this structure when setting up a business for you.

There are more articles out there with PayPal and trusts however since Micro businesses are most likely the heavy users of PayPal, they are generally setup as a sole trader or Pty ltd hence comply with PayPal's terms.

Yes we were. I was actually surprised they did this from all the stories I had heard.

I have experienced support issues with PayPal as well. I once had a customer on a subscription that froze. It was a bug in their system and all I got from PayPal was "how are we sure they signed up for this subscription".

In the end they didn't help, I cancelled the subscription and had to ask the customer to signup again.

I have never had my merchant account frozen for any period of time. There was once an issue when I first opened it. They called me, I told them what transactions had occured and why. They accepted it and continued on. In no time during that process did they stop payments or funds from being received. It's a big difference. They check with the business owner before they do something, not after like PayPal.