For reasons not entirely understood, I undertook to program an app using SwiftUI and Xcode on my Mac. I succeeded!
Having previously written a bot for Mastodon which, upon request, shares a random image from this blog, that’s where I decided to start.
For the bot, I created a rich data source with image names, links to images, dates, etc. so I used that as the basis for my new app.
I played around for a couple of days with the Swift playground and then felt confident enough to dive in.
This post shows the evolution of the app, from one that could barely display an image, to the final version which includes some nice font styling and the ability to see previous images.
It should be noted, I did use chatGPT to help generate some of the code. There are a lot of fiddly data mangling bits that I needed help with. It saved me literally hours, at minimum and in all probability, I would have been stumped and stalled without its help.
The app runs on iPhone, iPad and the Mac. The mobile versions aren’t ready to distribute yet (the Apple app store process is work I’ve yet to do), but the Mac version is, and is notarized by Apple, so there are no security warnings when you launch.
You can download the app at PicSurprise!
The first version includes the name of the blog post and the date posted.
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Next we added the name of the blog, some styling to the date, and a link back to the original article.
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First time our name appears!
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Now we’ve learned font styling and have a nice button to request a new image.
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The current version has buttons to view the previous or next image and they are active/inactive as appropriate.
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You can download the app at PicSurprise!