Phillip Caudell @phill@mastodon.notsobig.co

And I don’t mean to pick on this one dude. If you’ve never built anything like Big Mail before and you see other apps with huge betas, it’s fair to wonder why!

The challenge with Big Mail is every (and I mean EVERY) provider works differently. Then pile on each client doing their own thing. Then throw in a push and sync service.

It’s a lot of moving parts on a new stack I built from scratch. So yeah it’ll take a minute! 😅

1. If you just ask I usually do my best to accommodate you 🤓

2. 80% of the crashes last night were caused by 1 bug. It’s now fixed. So that’s 80% less people messaging me next time.

When you’re just one guy building something fairly complicated, that makes a huge difference!

Very excited to hear more about animated SF Symbols!

I've made a few of these myself in Big Mail by hand.

The new key framing API looks like it'll make this a lot easier, too. #SwiftUI

They compared it to the original Mac, iPod and iPhone.

But on day 1 those products were immediately and obviously better than anything that came before them.

Mac? An easy to use computer.
iPod? A better Walkman.
iPhone? A computer to go!

What does this do for us?

Perhaps I’ll have some magical transformational experience trying it on, but I just don’t understand this headset at all.

Apple had a chance to pitch why I should care, and they came up short. Why is this better?

“But imagine a future form factor!”

Okay, well if my grandma had wheels she'd be a bike.

tfw when they don’t talk about mail

Okay, now show me the cool new SwiftUI stuff.

$3499.

Next year.

Damn, this was such a great interview with @christianselig by @snazzyq 👏

I really hope Reddit reconsider. Apps like Apollo are what make these platforms so great (translation: actually usable).

What a way to kneecap one of your greatest assets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypwgu1BpaO0

I moved it into the ToolbarItem when I was recording the iPad promo videos, as it was presenting from the whole view, not the button, and it looked naff.

But now I guess I can't have that without iPhone transitions breaking.

This framework is exhausting.

So I noticed NavigationStack transitions had stopped working in Big Mail...again.

After spending an hour working back through my commits to find what stupid thing is causing it this time, the offender is…

...drumroll please…🥁

✨ Presenting a confirmation dialogue from a ToolbarItem ✨

it's not right but it's okay

me now my meds and the launch excitement have worn off

Despite going to great lengths on this, I know it still won't be for everyone. So you can still use Big Mail without any of the Big Mail Online stuff.

One of the reasons I gave BMO a distinct brand of its own, is so when you're in the app, any feature that uses it will be obvious.

(Plus it was a fun excuse to get nostalgic with MacOS 😅)

The Big Mail app on your device grants Big Mail Online a temporary access token to listen out for new inbox events.

When a new message arrives, Big Mail Online sees only the response "EXISTS".

This is then silently pushed to your device, which wakes up and connects directly to your mail provider to fetch the message.

Not even Apple see the contents, as it's just an empty push notification.

One of the more ambitious aspects of this project was how to bring Big Mail into the cloud: V1 was DOA without push and rapid sync.

But how to do it and still claim to be on-device/privacy centric?

My answer to this is Big Mail Online. A totally optional, private push and sync service.

I had one simple rule developing it: no message data get processed, parsed, or stored, on any server, ever.

Hello (again) !

Big Mail got rebooted.

Except this sequel is better than the original.

It's more Terminator 2 than Batman & Robin.

I'd love to hear what you think!

💌 https://bigmail.app

My website is more responsive than me