My name is Praveen Nagaraj ๐ (@prvnngrj), founder of News Landed and Fiedra ๐ฆ.
Hailing from the Bay Area ๐ and being raised by parents that work in big tech, ๐ 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 ๐ 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 ๐งโ๐ป in 3 months so I develop Fiedra ๐ฆ 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 โ๏ธ. 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 ๐งต. The current fashion in which iOS handles text formatting is cumbersome to implement. Styles such as bold and italics are hidden under symbolic traits ๐ฉ while styles such as underline and strikethrough are easily accessible directly as attributes ๐.
Now, you may thinking... why is this guy talking about TextViews and AttributedStrings ๐ค 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 โจ๏ธ (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. ๐คทโโ๏ธ