comics app
For my first post I want to talk about a side-project I've been working on for the last couple years. It is the next generation of comics for your phone!
The following video demonstrates what the comics look like:
Video showing a user navigating through an older version of the app called Terse.The comics feature nice little animations that are controlled by a user scrolling up and down the screen. I still feel like the concept has great legs, and no one else has done it!
geeks only
This project involves four codebases:
-
two native mobile apps for viewing comics
- TECH: Swift, some SwiftUI, XCode, Kotlin, Android Studio
- STATUS: iOS is about 50% complete, Android is about 90% complete
-
an in-browser editor for creating comics
- TECH: TypeScript, Svelte
- STATUS: MVP reached, lots of tuning and polishing to be done
-
a server to support the comics editor and serving comics to mobile apps
- TECH: Node.js, MongoDB
- STATUS: complete!
Additionally...
- the server is deployed to Azure via CI pipeline
- I am using OneSignal to handle push notifications
I won't try to defend all of these technology choices in this post -- there are things I want to change in that regard. But my goal this year is to ship!
The current iteration of the comics-editor. She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts.
on shipping
My goal is to ship all of this software this year. That means I'll need to do more than just code -- I'll need to figure out branding, make a logo, create some content, finish starting my business, start thinking about marketing, and probably some other stuff.
I'll also need to suppress the urge to rewrite things in new technologies I'm interested in (ex. my perfectly-good Node.js server doesn't need to be rewritten in Rails).
It has been and will continue to be a ton of work, but at least I can see the finish line. I'll be posting updates to this blog about it (partly to motivate myself to work on it in a coherent way). So stay tuned!
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