Leaving Substack

Published under Mango Umbrella, Dec 23, 2023

After reading the note, I decided to leave Substack. This is an easy decision.

However, I'm also pausing Mango Newsletter for now. Even though I could move it somewhere else, I couldn't make it a priority. I need to spend more time on the actual development of Mango Baby and my next app.

If you are still interested in a relatively low volume of the updates on my indie dev work, you can find Mango Umbrella at @MangoUmbrella@indieapps.space or @mango.umbrella@threads.net.

Published under Mango Umbrella, Nov 16, 2022

I'm taking a step further today.

git commit -m "Drop the bird link."

Published under Mango Umbrella, Jan 24, 2020

mangoumbrella.com now supports dark mode, enjoy!

Bye, Web Console

Published under Mango Umbrella, Jan 17, 2020

The mac catalyst app, dA Umbrella, has fully replaced my previous web console written in reacjs.

It’s the admin console behind mangoumbrella.com. It's a simple CMS, and a blog editor with markdown support.

What a satisfying change:

20 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 31123 deletions(-)

Published under Mango Umbrella, Jan 14, 2020

On January 1st, I made a goal to support editing and publishing blog posts in DA Umbrella by end of this month. But as mentioned in my previous post, the goal has already been achieved today, way ahead of my estimation.

Thinking about what went wrong right, it's SwiftUI. It makes UI composition, and more importantly, re-composition, much easier. Now that I realized its power, I simply could not imagine going back to pure AppKit/UIKit. (Cough.)

First Blogpost From dA Umbrella

Published under Mango Umbrella, Jan 13, 2020

Another milestone of DA Umbrella: this post is now written, edited, and published in the Mac Catalyst app. It uses a custom built markdown editor and parser.

It still lacks other markdown features according to the spec, and a lot more work needs to be done to make the UX great. However, this milestone means I can now start writing and publishing my blog in a Mac app. So exciting.

Here is a demo of supported syntaxes for my own tracking purpose:

Header 1

Header 2

Paragraphs with inline bold, italic, deletion, links, code, images, with markdown syntax highlighting:

Code blocks

Blockquote, with inline bold, italic, deletion, etc…

• Unordered list
• Another item

1. Ordered list
2. Another item

Published under Mango Umbrella, Dec 30, 2019

The Catalyst version of DA Umbrella just reached its first tiny milestone: all my project tasks now live in the app.

Published under Mango Umbrella, Dec 28, 2019

Language breakdown of all my personal projects as of 2019-12-27:

1. 66.9% C#
2. 17.8% JavaScript
3. 4.3% ShaderLab
4. 3.2% Objective-C
5. 3.0% Swift
6. 1.6% Go

My ambitious 2020 goal: Swift goes to #1.

P.S. SwiftUI ain't gonna help much with this goal 😂

A Pivot Point of dA Umbrella

Published under Mango Umbrella, Dec 22, 2019

The current admin console part of DA Umbrella is a web app built with reactjs. While it works fine when I am on my Mac, I find more often when I want an iOS to do a quick task. More importantly, those quick tasks would be much easier if the app supports share extensions or Shortcuts.

I finally took the action to start the new project in Xcode. Here is a screenshot of the hello world version:

Published under Mango Umbrella, Sep 23, 2019

Created a baseline typography guide for all things dA. It only uses one font, Inter. The guide will evolve over time, but I do hope to use Inter for everything across all platforms for a long time.