In my day-to-day job I’m a web developer. Admittedly, a web developer with a certain weakness for native apps. However, it’s been quite a while since I built anything substantial in Apple’s frameworks. The app projects I’ve been involved with in a professional capacity have exclusively been React Native projects.

So for the past year, in an attempt to dust the cobwebs off my native app skills, I’ve been tinkering with an app project that I’ve dubbed ”Mikro”. Mikro is a fully native Swift (and SwiftUI) app for Micro.blog.

Mikro is not intended to bring anything new to the Micro.blog platform. In fact – it’s not supposed to be innovative in any way, shape or form. Its sole purpose is to be a canvas for me to learn Swift and SwiftUI. Furthermore, it most probably won’t ever see the light of day.

That being said, I use Mikro every day to keep up with my friends and the Micro.blog community, and it kind of works. Until it falls short.

I don’t really know whether this is a good idea or not, but I figured I’d try spelling out some missing features to see if that gives me enough motivation to see them through.

Missing features:

In my mind, these features are table stakes and will need to be addressed before letting anyone else use Mikro.

• Search: Currently, there is no way to search in Mikro. Which means there is also no way of following new users.
• Notifications: Mikro doesn’t support any notifications right now.
• Long posts: Mikro doesn’t yet support writing long posts
• Attach media: Mikro doesn’t yet support attaching images or videos when writing a new post
• Log in: To underline just how much of a personal project Mikro is – I haven’t yet added any support for logging in. I just use a hardcoded authentication token that’s appended to every API request. 😄

Features I’d like to add:

These features definitely fall into the category of ”nice to have” features. But (of course) that won’t stop me from starting them (and perhaps finishing them) before even attempting the ”must haves” in the list above. Such is the life-cycle of a hobby project.

• Translation: iOS 18 will introduce an API to use on-device-processing to translate texts. I would love to add that to Mikro.
• Inspiration: With iOS 17, Apple introduced a Journaling suggestion API that can give you some inspiration on what to write about when authoring a new post.
• Mac app: when adding some functionality that was iOS-only, I managed to break the Mac app.

Mikro’s future

There probably isn’t one.

(But if there is – I promise to keep you posted.)