At the beggining of 2023 I started working on a Chinese Word of the Day
application in hopes of improving my iOS skills. A friend of mine
and I were sitting in a coffee shop and I asked him to name my app. He
came up with the name “Wobble”…. but that was taken so I ended up having to
name it Waabl.
It’s a silly name devoid of meaning and yet I have ground fond of it.
Apple accepted Waabl to the all mighty app
store during WWDC23. Getting the app published was a major milestone but I
still have a long ways to go until I’m happy with it.
2025 March 24th.
- Can’t believe I am still working on this app.
- I want to ship this update before my birthday.
Update to dev branch 10/19
The app now has the following features
- Cloud sync with de-duplication.
- Basic widget
- An ugly green button that you press to update word status.
It has taken quite a while to get here. In the end I had a realization when
I sat down with a notepad and thought about why the widget was not updating.
It was because the widget was doing a fetch request that relied on cloud kit
yet I had set up the widget to only use a local version of the store. So
it was not getting notified about the updates.
At that point I decided maybe my widget doesn’t even need to do a fetch
request at all. Instead I decided to make use of UserDefaults.
So now, whenever the main app updates the current word I
- encode and write the current word to
UserDefaults - reload the widget timeline.
I’m not sure why I resisted this solution originally. Next steps are to
refactor the code for this current commit and get ready to publish to the
app store :)