Swift on nsf.name

Copycat: iOS Copyparty Client

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:15:02 -0600

Copyparty is a genuinely great file server that I like using, and it’s played an important role in many smaller projects I’ve done throughout the year when something like scp or AirDrop just won’t do. The one area where it’s still really lacking is in user-friendly GUI and a native experience on mobile: while there is a pile of iOS shortcuts that allow for uploading to a copyparty server (and a small Android app that does roughly the same thing), it’s nothing quite like a full native app in terms of speed and ease of use.

Lufsa: Sticky Note Images

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:21:43 -0600

After previous projects with SwiftUI, I became curious as to what the limits of the framework are, and how different the development experience is between macOS and iOS apps. To push those limits, I aimed to recreate a somewhat weirder application: xteddy.

Why `xteddy`?

xteddy is a X11 application written by Professor Stefan Gustavson which originally did exactly one thing: draw a non-rectangular, floating window to the screen containing just the bundled xteddy image, and implement some basic handlers to kill and open it appropriately. However, later versions released in 1997 onwards allow you to load any arbitrary .xbm (X Bitmap), and in the Debian Linux port, .png files. This effectively made it a simple sticky note application but for images.

Rewriting WSO Mobile in Swift

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:59:16 -0500

At Williams College, most student technological services run through an organization called WSO¹, for common tasks like checking the course calendar, dining hall menus, rating professors, trading textbooks, and more. Since the college doesn’t provide its own app, that means our app is the standard app for the ~2,000 students who are active students.

Around December of 2025, I began to realize that we should aspire to do better than our current trainwreck of an app. The last time that WSO’s aging mobile app was rewritten before the rewrite that I am about to discuss here was all the way back in 2016, meaning the current mobile app was made of nearly a decade of unmaintained trash. I can’t even begin to explain how bad this actually was²:

Swift on nsf.name

Copycat: iOS Copyparty Client

Lufsa: Sticky Note Images

Why xteddy?

Rewriting WSO Mobile in Swift

Why `xteddy`?