Clipbud

Clipbud is a delightfully simple space for those text snippets you copy and paste a bunch.

My name is Adam and I'm a designer from South Africa living in Canada.

My first app, Joey, was how I learned SwiftUI. I built it just after our second child was born, because I wanted a simple and private way to track feeds and diaper changes. It seemed like a simple use case for learning SwiftUI and some of the basic data entry and persistence methods.

My second app Twodos went live a few months ago. It's a simple but opinionated todo list app that was featured on TechCrunch and The Verge, and was also casually mentioned on MKBHD's Waveform podcast.

My third and latest app is called Clipbud.

Like all of my apps, I built Clipbud to scratch my own itch.

I found there were text snippets I'd often be copying out of Notes and pasting in to emails, DMs, chats, and so on. The most common example of this is I get a lot of icon design inquiries, so I have a bunch of templated responses and questions to help speed things along.

Whenever I updated my social media bios across various sites, it was a pain to write it in one app, select and copy it over to the others.

Hashtags are another thing I use a lot, so having a really quick way to grab a set of them, or even combine multiple sets with Clipbud's Combine feature has been such a time saver.

At the time of writing (a little over a week after launch) Clipbud has a modest ~4,060 downloads. Twodos' first week by contrast was ~8,010 downloads.

I don't do any sort of marketing for my apps outside of their launch announcements on Twitter and Mastodon and the odd follow-up post, so I'm pretty happy with these numbers.

Truthfully, I'm surprised Twodos popped off as much as it did. I'm definitely thankful to anyone who takes the time to download and try my apps.

I've always wanted to develop iOS apps and even tried learning UIKit a couple of times, but SwiftUI ended up being the one that clicked for me.

It's such an approachable language and while you can hit the edges of the framework pretty quickly, you can still do so much as a beginner. Once you're more comfortable with it, some of those edges become a little easier to manage and overcome.

Clipbud itself is extremely simple. It's a basic CRUD app with a whole lot of interaction and visual polish on top.

I don't really think about it in those terms. All programming languages and frameworks have their downsides, it's just a matter of picking the set of tradeoffs that you're comfortable having.

I have limited free time (a full time job, 2 small kids and a host of hobbies keeps me pretty busy) so when I decided to start investigating SwiftUI I valued seeing results quickly, so I stuck with it.

That being said, there are times where I've wanted something a little more than SwiftUI offers, so getting comfortable with UIKit basics is next on my list.

I doubt I'd ever move away from SwiftUI entirely as it's only going to keep getting better and better, but I can imagine a world fairly soon where I'm working in a mix of SwiftUI and UIKit.