🪞 🚊

🐱

🍜

Can you even call yourself an iOS Engineer if you never shipped a Twitter or Pinboard client?

On the 2nd of January, I migrated my bookmarks from Safari / Pinboard to a self-hosted Shaarli instance. I generally prefer native Apps over web interfaces but couldn’t find a client for iOS/macOS. Time for a tiny new App.

aarle

aarle is pure SwiftUI App for macOS and iOS. The feature set is the bare minimum:

• Log in using a URL and the secret of your Shaarli instance
• Browser your bookmarks
• Filter your bookmarks by tag
• Declare favorite tags shown in the sidebar / start screen
• Basic Search
• Add / Edit bookmarks
• Share extension to add bookmarks

Only yesterday I decided to also add basic Pinboard support as the APIs are very similar:

• Log in using your Pinboard API key (can be found on the Pinboard settings)
• Basic search of your last 1000 entries

The backlog for minor improvements is already overflowing. As a next big feature, I would like to add offline read-it-later support using webarchives. Because why not.

Testflight

I hope to submit the App to App review in a few days, in the meantime you can join the Testflight groups:

• iOS Testing Group
• macOS Testing Group

The code

I’m not spending time on another hot-take how buggy SwiftUI is. I really enjoy working on this rather basic App and currently have no interest in building another UIKit/Catalyst App in my free time. It was also my first time spending more than a few minutes on SwiftUI for macOS. AppKit is Done - kean.blog was an amazing timesaver for this. The code itself is only functional, not clean, not dry, not covered with tests. Nothing to be proud of in itself, but I enjoy the App and that’s all that mattered here for me. If you are interested, it’s open source. For the basic UI architecture: A few stores that contain a redux-like flow are passed to the views as EnviornmentObject. The views listen to the store’s state changes and update it using actions.

🎥

🚊

🚲