Rob Fahrni

Today’s progress on Stream for Mac felt great. I was able to replace the Collection View item in the Blog List — leftmost column — with a native NSCollectionViewItem, which was extremely straightforward.

I also added right mouse click menu support so you can do a few actions in your blog list; Mark All Read, Copy Feed Link, View Website, and Unsubscribe. All of the actions work as expected.

Cmd+A now selects the top most item in the list — All — and displays all items from all blogs in the middle column. You can, of course, select that item with the mouse and get the same results.

The middle column adds right mouse menu support for; Copy Link, Open, and Share… All actions work as expected.

I’m showing my hand a little bit with the item called “Read Later.” 😃 Yes, I’m adding an Share Sheet Action that will allow you to not only “Subscribe in Stream” to add a subscription from the blog you’re browsing but a new item will be called “Read Later in Stream” that will stash a reference to any site you’re browsing so you can check it out later. Hey, I really need that for myself! It’s how I collect notes for Saturday Morning Coffee. For now I’m using John Brayton’s excellent Unread to do that for me. Stream needs that support so it’s gonna get it. Both the Mac and iOS versions will have it.

I still have a lot of cleanup and tweaking to do. Mostly in the area of design. I have visual nicities to add and tightening some visual elements up to make my eye happy. It’s getting there.

Some things that need fixing. Selection of a blog item currently has black text and a blue highlight. The text needs to become white so you can read it easier. I’d also like to round the selection rectangle a bit and give it some inset so it doesn’t look so sharp. They currently look like you could cut yourself on them! Same for the middle column. Selection needs some help and that includes the same rounding and inset work. Using the app shouldn’t result in cuts.

I have some nagivation stuff to add — like using the spacebar to advance an article and jump to the next one when you reach the bottom. I’ve already added vim J and K keys to havigate up and down the middle column. I’d like to be able to navigate the entire thing without taking your hands off of the keyboard. Need to add something for navigating the blog list with the keyboard, maybe D & F? Are there standards for that yet? I’ll see what other Feed Readers use.

I feel very close now. My current plan is to ship the first release without Settings, so no way to tip me. 😄 I will add that support next. For now I’m just really excited to kick it out the door. I can build on what I have from there. Once it gets out there are things I’d like to do for the iOS version and Mac version that will be shared. I need better article parsing, I rely on what the RSS feed provides and if it doesn’t provide the full text of the article, I can’t display it. In the future the app will go to the article and parse the full text if allowed.

So little time, so many features I’d love to do!

LET’S GO!

I was able to make it to the coffee shop and work on Stream today. I’ve been revisiting how to construct a good AppKit cell view — NSCellView — that does exactly what I want. And I continue to fail.

I’ve tried using constructing a cell using a NIB. It didn’t work as I’d wanted it to and I could never get it right. I abandoned that attempt.

Next I tried doing it in code. I managed to get the same exact results. It didn’t resize properly. I abandoned it.

I decided I should do it in SwiftUI. It only took me an hour or so of tweaks to make it work exactly like I wanted! Yay! 🥳

Next I had to get the little blue read/unread indicator working. I tried a lot of stuff but I couldn’t make it work driving it from an AppKit view (more on this later.)

So, I decided to give AppKit another try. This time using NSGridView in code. I wasn’t able to get the results I was after. So, you guessed it, I abandoned the attempt.

I thought I’d be clever and let Claude do it for me because I’m so darned hung up on it working as an AppKit cell.

I gave Claude a description of what I wanted, pointed it at the working SwiftUI version, told it to use my coding style, and turned it loose. At first glance I was surprised. What it built worked exactly like my AppKit versions. The date wasn’t pinned to the right of the cell view and things didn’t flow properly as I resized the cell. These are the exact same issues my hand built versions had. 😳

I went back to Claude and explained what I wanted to change and why. It went to work and made some tweaks. I thought, this is it!

Nope. Not it. Still has the same issue. The code was tweaked but I got the exact same results. 😳

I was puzzled to say the least.

At that point I was ready to declare I was a completely incompetent developer, throw my computer in a lake, and go hide away in the woods somewhere until I died.

I decided that was a little extreme and decided I’d go back to the working SwiftUI version.

Now, how do I actually get the darned blue read/unread dot to update properly?

I poked around at how Combine and SwiftUI work and how to properly expose and use a property when it updated. This time I went right to my model and made the very simple changes. Those worked as expected. 🥳

Now, to be clear, I’d tried some combination of things prior to this attempt and they all failed. Why didn’t I do it this way to start with? Well, I’m dumb, and stubborn, and wanted it to work a certain way, so I kept trying to do it my way. Sure, I used Combine and @Publish and ObservableObject, and the other macro I’m forgetting at the moment, or some other combination of those.

This time I told myself “Just bite the bullet and do it exactly like the documentation says, don’t try to fit it into your model.”

It works. I’m happy about it.

I stubbed out Command+click options on the cell and added some print statements just to make sure it did stuff. It did.

I packaged up my laptop and headed home. Now I sit here tying this up. I’ve been banging my head against a wall off and on since December of last year. I am an idiot and maybe I should quit?

Problem is, I really want to make this app. 😁

Time to hit publish and go mow the lawn, where I’ll think about my next steps for Stream for Mac. For the time being I’m freed of that burden I carried for so long.

Now I can do the features I need to ship the first release.

That is a good feeling. 👍🏼

I managed to break the splitter on the right side of the middle column last time I worked on Stream. How? I have no idea what I did to break it. After beating my head against the wall for a half hour I finally found it. I’d set the width of the rightmost column to a fixed value. Duh! Don’t do that if you want things to automagically resize. Fixed. ✅

I need to sit down and read about state management with SwiftUI because it’s clear to me I’m too stupid to use it. 😄

I want to do what I though was a simple thing. I just want to hide, or change the background color of, my read/unread dot. The iPhone app just updates a value in a view model to be true or false and the UI is updated, easy peasy. It’s using UIKit instead of SwiftUI so it’s something I’m very familiar with.

Is it that easy in SwiftUI? Probably, but I don’t currently understand how to change a simple boolean value and convince the UI to refresh itself. I thought, like a big dummy, that I could make a boolean value on the View, decorate it with @State, and by calling toggle() on it, it would cuase the UI to update. Nope. Didn’t work. 😳

I’ve tried a few things to make it happen and it’s obvious I don’t understand how to do it. So… it’s time to go sit down and read how to do it. The View I’m trying to update is hosted in an NSHostingView and I can’t imagine that has anything to do with it? Do I need to using @Binding and @State together in a way I haven’t tried? Or, perhaps, I need use something completely different. ❌

Pretty big fail on my part today. Which is pretty frustrating. I have such little time to work on it that I need to have productive days. Failure is part of the process. I’ll figure it out and be better for it.

I guess I did manage to fix a bug. That’s a good thing. Just not enough.

Time to go home and make a Turkey sandwich. 🦃

Another slow start to the day. I’ve hit a point in my todo list of items I don’t want to do. 😄 That’s always a good sign. It means I’m getting to the end of what I’d like to do to get a 1.0 out the door.

Today I covered three things.

J and K Navigation

I like the way Reeder and Unread use the J and K keys to navigate between feed items, so I added that. I need to figure out if I want to add it to blog navigation as well.

Persist and Restore Window Positions

This was a lot easier than I expected! Thank you Interface Builder! I was able to set a couple properties and it’s taken care of for me.

BUG: Fix Feed Item Refresh

I had an ugly bug that would cause the feed items table view to not refresh properly. I was final able to find the set of properties I needed to tweak to make this do what I wanted. Now the middle column — feed items — now updates properly. Bug squashed.

What Next?

Well, I still have a list of things I’d like to do and I need to work on polishing up how the app feels. When redrawing feed item cells the associated favicon image doesn’t fill in as quickly as I’d like. I’ll just cache all of them so hopefully we won’t have that issue any longer.

I also added a new container type for blog display — leftmost column — so I can add static type items in the column. I need at least to column headers; Articles and Subscriptions, so I can have an All Articles item and have all of the blogs display under Subscriptions for a bit of separation. The All Articles item will behave the same way as Cmd+A and display all feed items mixed together in the middle column. It’s also where I’ll place the items saved to “Read Later” but that may not be a 1.0 item, we’ll see how it goes.

I also need to make sure to get my Action Extension “Subscribe in Stream” working on the Mac so folks will be able to subscribe right from Safari.

Oh, one other annoying thing. I created a separate target for the Mac build and I had to name it Stream-macOS because Xcode wouldn’t let me have two Stream Targets. I suspect this was a mistake and to fix it I’ll have to add a new Target to the existing Target. I know, that may sound weird, but there is a way to do it and I didn’t know about it until I read up on it today. That will be a real pain in the butt to fix because of file inclusion per target. Ack! Not looking forward to that! 🤣

I got an early start this morning and managed to get to the coffee shop before they opened at 7AM. 😀

Once I got my coffee and settled in I got right to work. Got the app built and running then I noticed it wasn’t updating. DOH! Turns out my Mac had lost its mind and refused to connect to the network until I rebooted it. Even a Mac needs a reboot every now and then I suppose.

I’m still trying to figure out my feed item list UI rendering problem. When it reloads it goes through the proper code path; filters based on selection and tells the table view to reload itself. It does reload but half the time the items display off screen. I can get it to draw properly by scrolling the view. That’s when I noticed it would draw properly every other selection. 😳

This got me thinking about my choice to use SwiftUI for the table view cells. One thing about that choice is cell reuse is kind of strange. The only way I’ve been able to get them to draw properly is to make a new view, just the SwiftUI part, so it gets laid out properly. I’m fairly certain I could get this working by using SwiftUI’s state mechanism but I decided to try doing a proper cell using AppKit and hook up the constraints manually. I have the cell put together and was working on constraints when I ran out of time for the day.

If I’m feeling rambunctious I may work on it a bit this week. If all else fails there’s always next Sunday.

Worked on Stream for Mac today since we’re celebrating our granddaughters birthday tomorrow, should be a super good time. Looking forward to it.

So, today when I started I had to fix a couple of outlets in my Mac NIB for the main window. How this got busted I’ll never know but it was and it caused the app to crash at startup. I do this so rarely that I forget how to do it, so it sucked to have to start off that way. Fixed. ✅

Next thing on the fix it list was a bug I’d introduced three weeks back. When I’d refresh the blog list using a pull to refresh on the iOS build or Cmd+R for the Mac build it would make all the network requests and tell the view controller to do its thing, however I messed up my view model when I added the ability to filter down to single blog selection in the UI, whoops! That was a simple fix. ✅

I decided, with the time I had left, to add some keyboard support. Doing a Cmd+A will now select all feeds. I need to add an All item in the blog list so folks can click on it if they’d prefer to select to display all feed items for all blogs that way. Maybe next time.

I also added support for using the up and down arrows to navigate through the list of blogs or the list of feed items. That went together pretty quickly and I really like the results. Done. ✅

I’m going to add some vi support to the keyboard to do some navigating as well as making the space bar scroll the through the article you’re viewing or moving on to the next item once you reach the bottom of an article. Stuff like this are kind of table stakes in existing feed readers. Future addition.

Until next weekend I’ll have some new features to play with on my Mac. I’m tempted to start a TestFlight but it’s still so early days. Reach out if you’d like to try it now. It may crash and misbehave but it’s kind of fun to play with, if you can tolerate it. 😄

More work on Stream for Mac today.

I renamed some stuff because I had Feed and FeedItem used in various places. A Feed represents the Blog’s RSS Feed information. A FeedItem is a single entry from an RSS feed for a particular feed.

Those are accurate names in my opinion but just glancing at them can be confusing in their use in the code. So, what I did was rename the table view BlogListTableView and the view model for it BlogViewModel. I also added new classes for table views called BlogItemCellView and BlogItemTableCellView. It made things a lot easier for me to read and understand. The base models of Feed and FeedItem remain as they were.

I finally got around to filling in the left side table view of the three columns. This is a simple list of blogs. I also added a little code to allow me to filter the list of feed items based on the selected row in the blog list. Simple, expected, stuff.

After doing that I adjusted the blog cell and feed item cell to use a different font for the blog title and feed item title. They look a lot better now. I also added some padding around the outer edge to space things out so they’re not all jammed together.

The final task was fetching and caching the favicon for each blog. That’s where I wrapped up for the day.

I can now display a list of blogs. By default all feed items display in the middle column. When you select an individual blog the middle column displays just the items for that blog. I still have to add a new top level item to the blog list to allow you to select All items, but not today.

Today I worked on some refactoring so I could support another column in the Mac version of stream and I migrated away from my singleton instance of the database because it just felt gross.🤮

That removes the only singleton in the app and I feel a lot better about it.

I’m splitting some functionality out of a view model and putting it into a different view model to better support the third column Stream will now have.

Yes, I’m adding a feed column. Stream for Mac is the only version that will have that extra column because it feels natural for the “Big Dog” app to have it.

I still plan on keeping the app extremely simple and will provide a Timeline Mode that hides the feed column so it behaves just like the Stream we’re accustomed to.

More to come. Today was a lot of infrastructure work and rebuilding the iOS to make sure it still works as expected.

The Mac version is in a bit of a busted state because I ran out of time today. But I’ll get it fixed ASAP. 😃

Until next week, take ‘er easy.

I decided to go with working on Stream for Mac today.

The feed item cell has been a complete mess for years, yes, you read that right. It’s been a complete wreck for years now. I kept on insisting I do all the work using AppKit.

Today that changed. I needed to make progress and even though my SwiftUI experience is very limited I was able to get the general layout working the way I’d like it. It’s not complete by any means but each UI element is displaying in the place I want it to (mostly) and the cell resizes properly, oh, and the date label/text remains pinned to the right side of the cell. That was a big issue with my AppKit NIB attempt.

Polish, polish, polish is the next course of business with the new cell. It needs spacing updates, text size fixes, color changes, highlighting support, keyboard support, so many things. But, now that it lays out the way I want I can move forward.

This is the first SwiftUI code introduced to the Stream codebase, which began life in 2018.

I’ve managed to kick nine builds of Stream out to beta testers. That’s the most I’ve ever done! I owe this all to the four hours of time I’ve reserved on Sunday morning for working on Stream. It’s been seven weeks of work. Like I said in my last Stream Work Note I’m overjoyed at having this time to focus work on Stream and, of course, have a really great Mocha while I do it. 😄

During my testing I noticed that the one new feature I’ve been adding to the app would fail when Stream was tiled with another app. That really stunk because otherwise it looked great to me! Today I managed to fix that outstanding critter and it feels really great!

I’ve had two other bug reports come in specifically for my iPad support — thanks Lucian and Sean!

The first bug was occuring when you’d pick a feed to subscribe to. That porting of the code has been synchronous since day one. I figured why do it asynchronously when the UI was going to be blocked while I added the feed to your list and parsed it. Well, newer versions of iPadOS didn’t like that and the app would crash hard. Yikes! Can’t have that. I fixed that bug earlier in the week or maybe last week, I don’t remember, but it’s out of the way and now asynchronously updates the app, be it iOS or iPadOS.

The second bug was a bit more difficult to fix only because I couldn’t reproduce it. It turns out it was happening consistently on iPadOS 16.8.2. So, I added that simulator setup and kerpow! 💣 It happened right away. YAY! 🥳 It turns out I’ve been stacking two navigation controllers on top of each other since I added iPad support a few years back. DOH! The OS was just tolerating it so I didn’t know. Well, it looks like Apple decided it wouldn’t allow that any longer, and rightfully so! I fixed that issue yesterday.

This morning was spent fixing the tiling bug and it’s now done and a new TestFlight build it up. If everything goes well with that build it could be my final build before Tuesday’s Apple Awe Dropping event. 🤞🏼

Have I ever mentioned I’d love to work on Stream full time? I didn’t think so. 😄

I’ve been going to Grit, my favorite coffee shop, for the last six Sunday’s to work on Stream. It’s been really rewarding to spend the morning working on it. I typically work from around 8AM to noon, then grab Chipotle for my daughter and I and head back home.

That four hours of time has given me so much joy and recharges me for the week ahead. I cannot imagine how much better Stream could be if I were able to do this five days a week for five to eight hours a day! I might actually be able to make some real progress on the Mac version! 😱

Today I’ve managed to kick a beta build out the door. What I expect to release is version 1.6.0 as soon as Apple opens the door for glassified releases. Now, don’t expect much. Even with my four hours at a time to work on it I’m still very slow and the feature I’ve added isn’t glassy, at all. It’s something I’ve wanted to add for a very long time. It’s a feature meant to make things easier to subscribe to feeds. That’s all I’ll say about it for now.

What’s next?

Well, I had wanted to create an entire new view for adding and managing your subscriptions. I really need a nice way to populate the app your first time launching it and give you some great options when you pop open the Subscribe view controller. My plan is to create a nice set of hand picked feeds for users and, perhaps, add a set of recommended feeds using Apple’s built in LLM models. We’ll see at some point I hope! As long as I’m able to continue spending my Sunday mornings coding I think I’ll be able to achieve a lot on the app. I have a lot of features to add and bugs to fix! There are a lot of usability things I could do to improve the app and a few bugs I need to take care of.

Where’s the Mac version?

This is a tough one. And it’s only tough because I don’t know AppKit as well as I do UIKit. Yes, Stream is still 100% UIKit and the Mac parts I’ve done are all AppKit. I’m thinking I may do some new features in SwiftUI because I need the practice. I’ve never built anything with SwiftUI.

I’ve struggled to get layout on the Mac working the way I’d like. My table view cells look like crap and even with help from a dear friend — hi, Josh — I haven’t been able to get it right. It’s terribly frustrating and makes me want to jump out a window.🤣 Maybe SwiftUI will let me make those cells work on Mac?🤞🏼

I haven’t done a development work note in a long time.

I’ve started working on a new feature for Stream that required creating an App Group so I can share data.

I’ve added everything to my new Action Target and I have the code put together using existing classes, it was honestly pretty easy to do.

Now comes the interesting bit. If I understand how an App Group works I am going to have to move my existing database to the group container so the extension will be able to access it?

If that’s not the case I’m sure someone will let me know. 😂

The thing I’ve never tried to do is open a SQLite database from two processes. Does that even work?

If it doesn’t work, things are gonna get very interesting.

I can always create a separate database just for the Action Extension that matches the structure of the main database and have the main app import it at a later time.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to open it from the main app and the extension and have it work as expected, but I’m not holding my breath.

I managed to work on Stream for Mac for a little while yesterday. I got a bit confused about how menus operate on the Mac — from a developer standpoint. I’m an old Windows developer of 20 years turned iOS developer in 2009 and now exploring the Mac and AppKit (yeah, I know, it’s old and busted now.) I got hung up on who “owns” the menu in a Mac App. I’d never had to think about it before, now I have a better understanding of how the Mac and first responder work.

I was kind of beating my head against the concept until our internet connection decided to stop working and I was kind of forced to walk away for a bit. That was intimately the key to figuring it out. I asked some questions on the Core Intuition Slack, using my phone, got some great answers to my noob questions, and read about menus and first responder in a book I have available in Kindle. The book I used was Programming Swift! Mac Apps 1 Swift 3 Edition by Nick Smith. I jumped to Chapter 8 Menus, Toolbars, and First Responder and that did the trick. I’m hoping I’ll be able to carve out some time today to put my newfound knowledge to use. 🤞🏼

I have other chores to take care of first. Hopefully they don’t take too long. Heh, they always take too long. 😂

I didn’t do much on day two. I did a very basic layout that displays the long URL copied to the Pasteboard and got the link off of the Pasteboard and placed it in a text field. The layout it nowhere near final.

Then I decided to get Chipotle for lunch and got really lazy afterward and didn’t do any additional work.

Even though I was pulled into work yesterday I managed to start the rebuild of Arrgly to use SwiftUI. I do NOT recommend doing this on a real software project because rewriting an app is a sure way to lose money and possibly destroy your business. I use Arrgly as a learning application because it’s tiny and fairly easy to rework.

Yesterday I spent the day reorganizing the Xcode project. It was organized into different folders to make it easier to find things. I had it organized in groups like; Network, ViewModels, Utility, Parsing, etc. All of those lived under the main Arrgly build target and I’d like to reuse all of that code for the SwiftUI build.

Step 1

I added a new build target for the SwiftUI project, called SquishU for Squish Universal. Oh, yes, I’m renaming the app to Squish because I really hate Arrgly and that’s the best I could come up with.

Step 2

Once I had the new target I created a group called Shared and moved all of the code that could be shared between the two targets under the Shared groug and made sure the application could still build and run.

So far, so good.

Next

Now I need to sit down and start reworking the UI using nothing but SwiftUI. This is where the rubber meets the road and who knows how long it’ll take me to actully complete the work.

With any luck this will be in the App Store soon. The last version of Arrgly was pulled from the store by Apple because I didn’t rebuild it with a newer version of the iOS Frameworks. It still works fine on my phone, you just can’t download it any longer.