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 :)
Version 2 released — April 30, 2025 at 11:53 a.m.
Version 2 made it to the App Store. The update turned Waabl into a much more complete daily-learning app:
- iCloud sync keeps learning progress available across devices.
- A history view makes it possible to review previously learned words.
- Simplified Chinese and pinyin are now supported.
- A Lock Screen widget and two Home Screen widgets keep the current word visible throughout the day.
- Waabl is available for both iPhone and iPad.
The basic idea is still the same: learn one Chinese word at a time and use the phone checks already built into the day as small opportunities to review.