I like to shift gears. I have lots of ideas and like to try them out. I’ve shifted gears, yet again. Having taken the first half of the year away from Xcode to let my mind and thoughts get away from having to play catchup because of everything new in WWDC, and having watched the sessions I’m interested in, I’m back in Xcode-land.

It’s still a monolithic program with new and interesting bugs, and some old ones. I won’t dwell on that. What I want to touch on is the 5th rewrite of my writing app, Auteureist. Having taken time away from Swift/SwiftUI to work on Python and The Continuum has given me a fresh outlook on what I want in a writing app. Auteureist has been a highly opinionated app, my opinion. I wrote it to work the way I write. As Swift and the platforms have evolved, so has how I write. That’s an aside. The point is, I’m rewriting Auteureist yet again.

I’m going for simplicity of design and UI while still keeping all the functionality. I’ve reworked how the writing projects are saved and organized. I’ve made the UI more “standard” and easier to use. The code base is simpler, and there is less of it. I’ve gotten a better handle on Swift and my code is more efficient. (I still hate the syntax, and don’t get me started on the new macros component.).

I’m currently working on the metadata editors. Before SwiftUI Forms, I designed my own. At some point, I created forms that “built themselves” given a JSON structure. Right now, I’m reworking the JSON structure, simplifying it and incorporating it into a SwiftUI Form. My proof-of-concept works. I read a JSON file from my package, convert it to a dictionary in Swift (easy-peasy), and then pass the dictionary to a SwiftUI View. This lays out the form and its components. So instead of having umpteen SwiftUI Views, I have one view that can theoretically generate any form given a JSON dictionary. This also lets me change any stored data without having to update SwiftUI code, by updating the JSON file. It works. It's a nice abstraction.

That’s the good news. The bad news is,. inspector which I used to display the form, works inconsistently between the various Apple platforms. This isn’t surprising, since. inspector is a new feature.

On the Mac it works as expected.

On the  iPad isn’t detecting a tag I’m using in a switch statement, and the code falls through into the default case—but only if I use. inspector.

On the iPad mini. The. inspector is broken. It flies out into the middle of the screen, and only partially hides.

Same code. Three different results.

Oh well. Whatever the problem may be, I’m on the right track, and it will eventually be fixed.