Project Idea: Blog Editor App

While setting up this blog last week I started looking around for a Markdown app I could use to manage the content. I’ve been using Notable for awhile now to keep my own notes but due to some issues, such as the one I raised here, it doesn’t work well for Jekyll content.

I’ll be watching a few of the WWDC20 videos this week and, as a way to try out whatever I learn, I like to come up a relatively simple app idea I can work along the way. For WWDC18 I ended up creating a Harry Potter style Augmented Reality photo wall app to try out the ARKit framework. I’ll post about that another day.

So for this year, I think I’ll try to create a simple, cross platform, Jekyll content editor using SwiftUI.

Here’s some high level requirements for what I’m thinking.

• Simple split view style layout with a list of posts in the sidebar
• Clicking a post when open a plain text editor on the right to edit markdown
• A preview button that will switch the text editor to a HTML view that renders the markdown
• Ability to save changes and somehow sync with other devices
• Support Jekyll metadata in the markdown content
  • Strip it out before displaying the content in the editor
  • Provide the ability to edit the metadata in a popup window
• Target platforms would be iPad and MacOS
• Try to stick pure SwiftUI as much as possible

At this point this feels mostly achievable. Bring on WWDC20!