Mikro updates
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.
Jarrod Blundy That’s looking so good! Congrats on your progress. Are notifications in your scope?
Johan Larsson @jarrod thank you for your encouragement. Notifications are definitely in scope. In fact – I’ve recently reached out to @manton in order for Micro.blog servers to be Mikro-aware and pipe first-party notifications to Mikro.
I believe I’ve done most of the plumbing for the notifications to work but it remains to be seen. 😄
Manton Reece @jarrod Ironically I made a change to more easily support third-party certificates like Mikro and that’s what broken this. 🙁 Totally my fault. The fix is going out now.
Jarrod Blundy That’s awesome, best of luck. I love the native look and interactions of what you’re building. 🤞 that you’ll find it worthwhile to release!
@manton Hoisted on your own petard, as it were! 🫤 I’m just glad to hear you found the issue. 🥳
Jarrod Blundy @manton It didn’t mention you in my last reply for some reason 🤷♂️
Manton Reece @jarrod Fixed. There was an invisible character before my username that was tripping up the auto-linking. 🤔
Pratik This looks great. I love how you display photos especially multiple ones. @jarrod
Vincent This is great! Let me know if you ever have questions on the MB API front also — more than happy to help where I can ✌️❤️ Also, just one suggestion, you might have to be careful with the sign up link when going through App Store review, they might not like that.
Johan Larsson @pratik thank you! I’m very happy with the horizontal layout of photos so I’m glad that others like it too.
Johan Larsson @vincent thank you! That means a lot!
I wrote the copy for the SignInView just moments before doing the screen recording so I will most certainly keep that in mind when (or “if”) it will ever reach App Store status. 😊
Numeric Citizen Oh. my. god. I want this! Add me to the beta! I’ll pay for this when it ships!
Dustan Ingenthron This already looks very nice. I look forward to seeing your continued progress.
Joakim Faiss Really nice. And very honored to be showcased for the image viewer and translation demo (even if the translation is indeed perfectible) 😉
Jan Erik Moström även om jag skulle vilja se detta så fort som möjligt … så ta hand om ungarna först, de är mycket viktigare
