Status first: I never remember this, but once you submit an app to Apple for review, you really do not want to be changing that code in case you need to make changes. So now that Maze Pseudo 1.1 has been submitted, I do not want to immediately work on Apple TV enhancements for it. Additionally but not really a roadblock is I need to alter the service name registration for Maze Pseudo. That should take another week or so. Good thing I have multiple things on my list of projects.
I started an iOS project 5 years ago and abandoned it when Apple released sharing data via the cloud amongst several devices. The mechanism to share data was going to make the app not function very well and the expectation that it would share the data. I realized recently that last summer, Apple made enhancements to their cloud infrastructure that allows the app to be viable again. So I have been spending some time working on that code to move it forward into current technology. And behold, I ran into a registration issue with it and Apple. Nothing that is earth shattering, but until I get that straight with Apple, I cannot test the functionality to be done next on it. I can write code for it, just not test it.
As for the app that I want: I cannot have it. At least not right now. Social media generally has gotten unmanageable. Various platforms have gone to a model of determining for you what you want to see, how you want to see it, and how you interact with it. Mostly this is driven by the desire to get advertising dollars by keeping you constantly engaged with it. I want social media to occupy less of my time, not more. It should make my life easier, not harder. To that end, I want an app that takes various social media platforms and combines them into a single place. Pull Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, a couple free standing forums, and some blogger feeds into a single combined source. From that source, allow me to divide it into groups of items. Groups would be customizable. For me there would be a group of important items that would be family and friend's postings (not sharing, liking, commenting), but actual posts about themselves.. It probably includes a couple people that I follow that are important to me. This group would be the one I would check frequently. I would have a group for News, i.e. the networks, newspapers, etc that I used to follow until it made reading my feed impossible. I would have a group for games, just so I could find those posts when I was in a place to play the games. And lastly a group of other interesting things for times when I have more time to catch up, i.e. friends shares and feeds that did not fit into one of the other groups.
I want the items in the groups to be ordered oldest first. I live time moving forwards, not backwards or in some random order that a computer thought I might like or worse in an order that someone else paid you to put it in. I want to be able to swipe right to save an item for later. Swiping left would mark an item read and I would never see it again. Some other action would allow me put the item in another group or mark the item as liked or to post a comment or reply or to follow it more closely to see future comments or replies.
I want to be able to set up filters to hide, mark items as read, or move them to a specific group based on word content and/or type of item. This way, I could remove those postings about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump and still see the things from fans of those people that are not related to politics. Yes, the blog post just got filtered away. So sad, said nobody.
I want to be able to move from device to device and share the state of items across all devices. This way, I could check the important group on my phone while out and on my iPad while watching TV, watch the videos and read longer items on my Macbook, and play the games on my PC. Or just mix it all up and do whatever wherever.
I want social media to enhance life, not take over life. The social media items that are most important to me probably do not contain a picture, video, or URL. They probably do not have hundreds of stars or likes or retweets. They are the hand typed short editorials by people I care about. They will say happy things like I had a great day today or its beer-o-clock. Or the sad things like I had a crappy day yesterday or beer-o-clock ended an hour ago. Or the funny things like somewhere in the world right now it is beer-o-clock.
