I’m definitely having some fun with SwiftUI, although “fun” is sometimes short for FrUstratioN. I know, I know, it’s beta, people, and I should be willing to deal with that, but it’s so exciting to have a whole new technology that I want to explore, have not so much time in the week to do it, and to have it shifting–sometimes fairly significantly–every couple of weeks.

Concepts that were just introduced a couple of months ago are being deprecated. And code that worked last week doesn’t work today. And working through Apple’s own tutorials doesn’t work without combing throught he change logs to see what adjustments need to be made.

But I’ve got a bee in my bonnet, so I plod on, trying to build something as the sands shift around. What I’m starting to realize, though, is that there’s a non-zero chance–even a large chance–that even after it goes live and to production, it’ll still be shifting. OH NOES! But I guess we dealt with that with the underlying language, Swift 5 is pretty different from Swift 0, so, well, so be it.

The bee in my bonnet is a project that I want to bring to iOS that I started to build on the web, but as I was building it out on the web, I realized it would be a lot more compelling to me if it were always in my pocket.

The idea is a curated news service called Gently Aged News (gentlyaged.news) which will allow me to highlight one new topic a day, then follow up on it a week later, a month later, six months later, and a year later. There are dozens of times a day when I wish I could easily update the site while on my phone, but it almost never occurs to me when I’m in front of my computer.

Since it’s really just a passion project, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to leave the web site as a second class citizen. It’ll be able to take advantage of the data compiled through the app, but it won’t be the primary source of truth.

My plan is to start it out with just one curator–me!–building out content on whatever topics happen to catch my interest that day. Politics today, Apple rumors tomorrow, celebrity sightings the next. But each day, users will be able to see today’s article, an update from topics first covered the same day last week, 30 days ago, 180 days ago, and 360…

Eventually, if I actually get a user base, I’ll probably open it up to other curators, especially if folks want to specialize on topics that I don’t follow closely enough. Someone want to start a channel on the Latvian punk rock scene? That’d be awesome! Someone interested in South Asian politics? YAY! Do we have an expert on the economics of developing countries? OMG, I’d love to have you contributing.

That said, I’m starting small. Updates soon. Maybe in a week, a month, six months, and a year.