Cody Bromley

Threads is everything I loved about Twitter, Mastodon and Reddit rolled into one.

Building interfaces with SwiftUI finally feels like the write way to build for Apple's platforms. Declarative syntax that actually makes sense, real-time previews that work (most of the time), and the ability to target iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro with the same codebase are amazing. The only real catch is that newer SwiftUI features get tied to specific OS versions, so a shiny new SwiftUI option might require bumping minimum version requirements. Mac users tend to stick with older macOS versions longer than iPhone users upgrade iOS and while a new SwiftUI API is available to 80% of your iPhone users it might only be available to 40% of your Mac users. The result can be lots of #if checks everywhere, maintaining parallel code paths, or just accepting that your app will feel a generation behind for a while. It's the dark side of "write once, run everywhere" when "everywhere" has different update cycles and user behaviors.

I've been building cross-platform apps with SwiftUI (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, visionOS) and the experience is genuinely delightful. The syntax is clean, idiomatic, and just makes sense (even when Xcode decides to be Xcode). The language design is thoughtful and modern. SwiftUI makes UI development feel natural across all Apple platforms. Type safety without the verbosity. The tooling ecosystem is still smaller than I'd like. It's very much "the Apple way" - polished but contained within their world. If you're building for Apple's ecosystem, Swift is the obvious choice and far better than something cross-platform in an Electron shell. Just don't expect the sprawling community you'd find with JavaScript or Python.

There simply wouldn't be Blankie without FreeSound. For more than 20 years, FreeSound has been THE place for open licensed audio and I'm excited to use sounds from there and look forward to exploring some of their API features in the future.

I wanted a way to make Blankie a great website without a lot of upkeep, and Astro delivered. The Vite core underneath it all generates such a clean static site and I'm thrilled that the site is 100% passing on Lighthouse.

SwiftUI made it possible to keep Blankie lightweight and do all the great things that are possible with the system SDKs. In an world where many apps go the Electron route, I'm excited that Blankie is native.