SwiftoDo is a passion project for me. I love working on it, but, due to work and family obligations, I have very little time to do so. Consequently, I am way behind schedule in adopting features introduced in iOS 11. I also learned, the hard way, that lots of minor UI-related bugs popped up when I changed the app’s target iOS framework from 9.0 to 11.0. I have been slowly discovering and cleaning up those bugs, and adding minor features here and there, for the past two and a half months.

Release cadence

I have decided to release working code as soon as possible, rather than trying to batch features and bug fixes into larger releases. Therefore, I have been issuing new releases about once per week, the past few weeks. I will not be keeping up that release cadence, but I do want to reflect to my customers that the app is actively developed. More importantly, I want bugs to be fixed for all my users. I would much rather have a rock-solid, very simple app than an unstable one with lots of bells and whistles.

Features

That said, I do want to keep adding bells and whistles. I am working on adding drag-and-drop support at this point, and plan to look into adding clickable URLs and Siri support. I have a long list of other ideas and concepts drafted, too.

I would like to add additional data providers, other than Dropbox, but I have little exposure to coding networking code, and the third party libraries I’ve looked at look like more trouble than they are worth. For some perspective, Dropbox’s SwiftyDropbox library, which powers file sync now, is a great library, but is also the source of most of the mysterious crashes on startup that a small number of people have reported. What is frustrating to me, as a developer, is that I can’t really fix those crashes, because I don’t fully understand what causes them, and the code is in a library. I don’t want to open my app up to more instability just to add a data provider. Also, I have been loath to support iOS 11’s Files app integration, up to this point, because I don’t see how the todo.txt “Archive” function, which moves completed tasks to another file, would be able to work with it.

Current focus

I have way more ideas for features and improvements than time to complete them. My focus in the near term will be on stability and satisfying user requests that seem like they would be useful for a majority of my users. Hopefully that is good enough for now. It’s amazing how much work my simple, text-based task list app has been!