ShortFox

About

ShortFox is an iOS application I developed as a YOURLS client for any self-hosted instance of YOURLS. It was also an excuse to get hands-on experience with iOS development and the Xcode IDE. I designed the app to communicate with the YOURLS API, allowing anyone to create short URLs from within the app rather than visiting the web interface.

Outcomes

Developing ShortFox taught me a lot about iOS development, including the use of CocoaPods and Git¹. It gave me a glimpse into the app development world, and to this day, seeing the application published on the App Store gives me a little pride in the work I put into it (and the fact it still gets around 40 downloads a month).

Apart from gaining experience with Xcode and Git, developing ShortFox taught me much about the importance of project decomposition, writing proper comments, and Swift! Trying to work on the U.I. and the software simultaneously was quite challenging! Learning to properly split my project into smaller bite-sized chunks was really useful.

Looking forward

Needless to say, I still want to make many changes to further improve the app (i.e., the U.I. and making it more accessible). I hope to revisit the project later and implement these changes. Although I still try to fix any bugs that arise via user complaints as soon as possible.

Current Roadmap

• Add support for other services (i.e., bitly)
• Add a tutorial page for new users
• Improve account selection
• General code cleanup

Footnotes

1. ShortFox was the project that inspired me to start using Git as a way to keep track of any changes, and roll them back if necessary. ↩