Prose is a passion project of mine that got the rug pulled out from under it before it was even released. That was back in 2014. Now it’s 2017 and I want to document what I’ve been working on.

A Quick Recap

I initially began writing Prose as a way to teach myself Objective-C and by the time of it’s release I had succeeded at that. After the announcement that App.net was shutting down its demise was slow, so slow I convinced myself that I would be able to refine Prose and release the next version while App.net was still functioning. I began re-writing everything and, like the first version, this next version became a way to teach myself Swift.

Before relocating to Nürnberg in the summer of 2016, progress had slowed as I prepared to begin a new job. I heard @33MHz was working on pnut.io, his take on a timeline based social network, but I didn’t look into it immediately.

Some time later, bored on a bus back from Munich, I decided to experiment with pnut.io’s API. In an extremely roundabout way I launched Coda on my iPad, opened a connection to my VPN in London, and created my first post. That weekend I created a new Xcode project and started building Prose from scratch with support for pnut.io.

Current Progress

After releasing Prose I outlined some goals describing the direction I wanted to take the next version. I’m happy to say that I’ve implemented many of them in Swift:

• Archivable data model built with Swift value types to replace ADNKit.
• A networking layer built on URLSession instead of AFNetworking/Alamofire.
• A more user friendly interface for switching between streams.
• Multiple accounts.
• Basic support for dynamic font sizes.

I have many things left to implement but I’ve made significant progress towards a usable beta release.

Despite years of learning, rewriting, and refactoring I’m keen to release something once more. You can follow @prose for the official announcements or my personal account @shawn for a more informal look at ongoing developments.