Phillip Caudell @phill@mastodon.notsobig.co

If I gave the compiler anymore context I'd be giving it the assembly

"Let me just do a quick refactor and make some of these functions generics"

tYpE Of eXpReSsIoN Is aMbIgUoUs wItHoUt mOrE CoNtExT

Me: I should do something Apple will never do

Everyone: NO NOT LIKE THAT

There is one particular feature in Big Mail 2, that is so unbelievably stupid, I cannot believe I'm actually gonna ship it.

Live your dreams people! ✉️🪓

Another day, another IMAP server makes the naughty list.

Server: “Hey, I can totally do that!”

Big Mail: "Okay great, here’s that command!”

Server: “WOAH HOLD UP WHAT THE HELL IS THIS??”

Unified labels across Gmail and iCloud?

“How much money have you invested into this app now?”

Me:

Baby where we’re going, we don’t need grids

Me: Hmm, I’m struggling to align this unread indicator, let’s see how Apple does it in Mail

Apple Mail:

This concludes this morning's stream of consciousness.

Tune in tomorrow!

Writing these packages has also been a fun exercise in how to design APIs now that we have concurrency.

For example, subscribing to IMAP idles (pushed events), I borrowed the 'updates' pattern used in the new StoreKit 2 API. It's an AsyncStream that just runs forever, and gets iterated over when new events occur.

Big Mail 2, nay, ALL my apps, wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the generous contributions of others in the OS community.

I can't wait to give back, so that's why I plan to open source all of Big Mail's core packages: SwiftIMAP, SwiftSMTP, and SwiftEmail.

They're all super Swifty, modern, and hopefully instantly familiar to anyone who's used Foundation. #Swift

There's also a sister package, GRDBQuery, which gives you a @Query property wrapper for SwiftUI (similar to @FetchRequest in Core Data)

You're then able to write views that automatically update when anything in the database changes.

Here's all the code needed for the account picker in Big Mail. So clean.

https://github.com/groue/GRDBQuery

Related: I binned off Core Data for Big Mail 2, and instead have been using the phenomenal GRDB by @groue

Not only is my app now faster and less buggy, but it’s so much easier to reason with. No weird managed contexts and elaborate dances to pass stuff between threads. Just simple, safe, Swift structs.

(Also, the documentation is INSANE) https://github.com/groue/GRDB.swift

Yeah, I write SQL queries

Xcode is now literally burnt into my display 🔥

Swipey swipe 🫵

Edit: this is swiping left on the message viewer, not tapping the List. Don't worry it's not a transition 😬

Here it is on iPhone: https://mastodon.notsobig.co/@phill/109942899530912122

And here's the rub with SwiftUI: I'm sure there are certain things I'm still doing “the wrong way”, despite doing this everyday, and reading all the docs and examples I can.

But because there have been so many genuine issues (as seen by others), my default position is “Well, the API must be broken then”. That's not a helpful mindset when debugging.

Building a low level IMAP/SMTP library has been a breeze compared to understanding how to use these APIs correctly 😅