My name is Praveen Nagaraj 👋 (@prvnngrj), founder of News Landed and Fiedra 🦋.
Hailing from the Bay Area 🌉 and being raised by parents that work in big tech, 🍎 WWDC has always been a day of excitement for me. Though my parents have always worked in hardware, software development has slowly grown to become my passion more out of necessity.
I founded News Landed (an open news publication 🌎 that reaches millions of users every month) in 2019 with the goal of making it accessible for anyone to apply and join to write for a large audience. Realizing that News Landed was fundamentally limited as a publisher, my team and I set out to create Fiedra, a social network for long-form content.
After many unsuccessful attempts to recruit developers for my project, I took on the task of learning iOS development 🧑💻 in 3 months so I develop Fiedra 🦋 myself. A year later, Fiedra entered private beta testing, running (what I believe to be) the best mobile blog post editor amongst any platform.
For WWDC 2021, I am really hoping for updates to UITextView and and TextKit ✏️. UITextView has many missing features, forcing developers to create (and make open-source) their own versions of UITextView such as TwitterTextEditor.
I am also hoping for major updates to NSAttributedString 🧵. The current fashion in which iOS handles text formatting is cumbersome to implement. Styles such as bold and italics are hidden under symbolic traits 😩 while styles such as underline and strikethrough are easily accessible directly as attributes 🙏.
Now, you may thinking... why is this guy talking about TextViews and AttributedStrings 🤔 when there are much more exciting stuff involving ML, LiDAR, and Apple Silicon. Well, just like Tumblr, the platform I'm developing deeply involves efficiently manipulating and formatting text ⌨️ (natively), without the use of web-based editors like Notion. Given the current state of native text formatting in Swift, I really think it's time for an update!
What's the point in all these high-level APIs when simple text formatting isn't developer-friendly enough for everyone to use. 🤷♂️