Hot on the heels of the WriteFreely Swift Package, I'm kicking off another fun open-source project: building a WriteFreely client for all Apple platforms as a SwiftUI multiplatform app.

I've written about the project a bit more here, where I'm sharing updates on the WriteFreely/Write.as work I do. If WWDC got you interested in learning more about multiplatform apps and SwiftUI, join me in building this! The goal is to go from what you see in the GitHub project today to a functional app by the end of August. Developers of any level of experience are welcome!

This work will have two tracks — building the client app, which will be the bulk of the work, and improving the Swift package. Personally, I'm more excited about SwiftUI and multiplatform apps than I've been about other tech stacks in a long time.

That said, one of the reasons Per has been stagnating for as long as it did was because I got bitten by the Swift 2 → 3 transition, which kinda broke everything. I'm hoping that it'll be smoother for SwiftUI as it's improved and extended over the next few years.

More TK!

#writeas #projects #swift #swiftui

Discuss...

It's been a while since I posted an update here, and I wanted to announce a new project: a WriteFreely Swift package that you can drop into your Mac and iOS apps.

You can find it here: https://github.com/writeas/writefreely-swift

What's WriteFreely?

WriteFreely is an open-source platform for writing on the web. It powers the Write.as service (find me here!), and lets you build writing communities on the web.

I was introduced to Write.as and WriteFreely while working with Glitch, where I got to chat about the service and its principles with Matt and CJ. Matt wrote a thoughtful post on Glimmer about the importance of privacy for creating on the web, and CJ built a tonne of cool sample apps that connected to the Write.as service for their Glitch team.

Cool, Tell Me More About The Project

This project represents a couple of firsts for me:

• This is the first time I've worked on a Swift package
• This is the first time I've wrapped a RESTful API in Swift
• This is the first time I've worked with URLSession and Result in Swift

Right now, it's an alpha/developer-preview release. There's a lot of room for improvement here, and I'm looking forward to working towards a 1.0 with the WF community.

As I mention in this forum topic and my Write.as post, the design for the WriteFreelyClient is to leverage completion blocks that return a Result tuple with either a User, Post, or Collection (or an array of these types where that makes sense), or an Error on failure. That makes it pretty easy to build completion handlers:

func loginHandler(result: (Result<User, Error>)) {
    do {
        let user = try result.get()
        print("Hello, \(user.username)!")
    } catch {
        print(error)
    }
}

guard let url = URL(string: "https://your.writefreely.host/") else { fatalError() }
let client = WriteFreelyClient(for: url)
client.login(username: "username", password: "password", completion: loginHandler)

What's Next For The Project?

Good question! There are definitely some major to-do items that are obvious to me:

• Add a test suite (there will be some refactoring required to facilitate this)
• Create generic-ish request templates to DRY out the WriteFreelyClient public methods
• Extend for use with the Write.as platform

Mostly, though, I'm excited for people to try it out and let me know how it works for them!

#writeas #projects #swift

Discuss...