I continue to chip away on Mikro, my third-party Micro.blog app.

It’s not a particularly speedy process. Mainly because I’m not an experienced Swift or SwiftUI developer. But also – and more importantly – since it also competes with the most important job of all: caring for my kids during my paternity leave. 😄

Nothing has really changed with regard to the motivation of the project. I’m still hesitant to ever release it publicly and its goal is not really to bring anything new to Micro.blog. For now, it’s solely for me. But I do use it every day and it has replaced the official Micro.blog app for nearly all tasks.

So, for no particular reason other than I wanted to share, here are some progress since last time:

Sign in works

My Micro.blog credentials are no longer hard coded into Mikro (phew!) and it’s now possible to sign in using any Micro.blog account. The account credentials are stored (and potentially synced) in Apple Keychain so that they remain safe and secure on your devices.

Image viewer tweaks

I’ve spent some time to tweak the transitions between the timeline and the image viewer. There is still some clipping going on that I can’t figure out how to get rid of but it’s getting there.

Translation

I’ve added a button to quickly translate the text of a post using Apple’s built-in translation and UI. I’m not particularly happy about the UI/UX of the translation so I might try to display the translation inline instead of showing the default translation sheet. The Apple translation service is also quite limited but hey – it works. And it took almost no effort to add it.

WYSIWYG Editor

I’ve been experimenting with MarkupEditor to enable rich text editing when composing a post. Overall I’m very happy how far it has gotten me, especially with so little effort. But I really want to polish the UI and UX some more.