Website redesign, semester recap, and iPhone apps
Hello friends! Happy New Year!
I have a few updates for you from the land of being-on-break-from-school-and-having-lots-of-time.
Website redesign!
I took some time to finally redesign my personal website! The gist of it is that I rebooted my blog (and I’m writing in Ghost again) and moved some sub-pages to subdomains under ben.page, to keep benborgers.com itself cleaner and easier to maintain.
I also wrote a blog post about the redesign if you’re interested in reading more!
Semester 3 recap
On this aforementioned rebooted blog, I wrote a recap blog post about how the first semester of my sophomore year at Tufts went.
Cheddar
I’ve made a few unsuccessful attempts at learning SwiftUI and making iPhone apps in the last few years, but it’s never stuck. That changed last week!
I went through Apple’s tutorials and built my first (very simple) SwiftUI app — Cheddar, an app just for myself to check how much freelancing time I’ve tracked in the past few weeks.
I also figured out how to build a homescreen widget, which was very fun.
tufts.lol
After Cheddar I immediately dove into another SwiftUI app called tufts.lol.
My idea with it is to compile features for Tufts students, starting with the study room reservation system. The existing system is quite janky and not mobile friendly, so I want to build a layer on top as a mobile app.
I’ve got the list of upcoming bookings working! I can’t add book-a-new-room functionality until they open up that ability for the upcoming semester. But instead, I did add a mobile-friendly interface for browsing dining hall menus.
That’s all for me! I’m looking forward to writing more on my blog and sending these email newsletters out more consistently. Thank you for reading them!
happy 2023,
Ben