App Design Project: Inbox Assistant

The other day, Miguel de Icaza announced a pair of Swift packages to do email stuff. This, of course, makes me happy. I love email. Email is one of the greatest technologies in existence for the sometimes online computer: it gracefully handles periodic disconnections, so it’s my go-to for thinking about how to deal withContinue reading “App Design Project: Inbox Assistant”

Feature: Editing Preview

…or, WYGIWYG Context: in the Olden Days, I used a word processing application to write papers for school. The computer I used didn’t have pixel-level display, so rather than rendering the document as it would appear on my printer, I just got to edit the text along with the embedded control codes to turn onContinue reading “Feature: Editing Preview”

Well-known avatar location

Terence Eden wrote a blog about a proposal for, essentially, “You want my avatar? Fine, you have my email address, go get it yourself.” Which, I must say, I like the premise. A lot. Since the key, in this exchange, is a person’s email address, the proposed service would most likely be something handled byContinue reading “Well-known avatar location”

Software Architecture Headache – Dependencies

I want to make my applications share data across devices, and do it even if the greater Internet is unavailable, if there’s a local network. So, peer-to-peer stuff. I went looking and found a framework that seems to be aimed directly at peer networking: LibP2P. There’s even a Swift implementation of it, sort of. EarlyContinue reading “Software Architecture Headache – Dependencies”

Framework: PowerSync

I’ve decided not to sweat trying to sell my applications (or even make them available) through the App Store. That is pretty freeing, really. It means I can stop trying to solve everyone’s problems and just focus on solving my problems. Given this new clarity, I’ve been thinking about what my problems really are, and the oneContinue reading “Framework: PowerSync”

App Publishing Tool: AltStore

This has come across my awareness a couple of times in the past several weeks, and it sort of entangles with some app development ideas I’ve been wrestling with. But anyway: AltStore. It’s a way to distribute apps to iOS platforms without (sort of) going through the Apple App Store. The easy way is onlyContinue reading “App Publishing Tool: AltStore”

Frameworks: Ensemble, Forked, Swift Data

I just learned about the existence of a framework called, “Forked.” The blurbs about it talk about “local first” application design and automated merging of concurrent offline editing. This seems very interesting to me. So I started looking at the source code and the example applications, and then reading about other stuff in the “localContinue reading “Frameworks: Ensemble, Forked, Swift Data”

Software Architecture Matters

I’m starting to take a look at Swift Data, and the experience is really, really uncomfortable for me. The tutorials and explanations of how this framework works and how it integrates with SwiftUI really serve to remind me that the way I think about structuring my programs is just plain not how most other folks whoContinue reading “Software Architecture Matters”