Waabl

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.

Update to dev branch 10/19

The app now has the following features

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

  1. encode and write the current word to UserDefaults
  2. 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 :)