Playing with SwiftUI
Hello friends!
This week I found a little time to start building out an app idea I’ve had for a while: wrapping the terrible university portals for dining hall menus, meal swipe / on-campus currency balance, and study room reservation, into a nicer interface.
I’ve also been wanting to get better at SwiftUI, Apple’s new framework for building iOS apps. So this week I built out a login flow using SwiftUI and Laravel. Here’s a video I tweeted of it in action:
Got free sign-in-with-phone-number working with SwiftUI and a custom backend!
— Ben Borgers (@benborgers) March 10, 2023
(SMS providers allow free incoming texts, so by reversing the process my only cost is 50¢/month for the phone number. Huge credit to @thefuturematt for pointing me towards this idea 😁) pic.twitter.com/zMEhPXH5WM
I know I’ve harped on this idea of “reverse phone authentication” before (where the user sends the app a text, instead of receiving a verification code), but indulge me for a moment.
I find it so cool that you can take advantage of free inbound texts to do this (I’m using SignalWire to do the phone number, and they don’t charge for inbound texts, just outgoing texts). It’s a super similar experience, but it doesn’t cost money for each login.
And implementing it was fairly straightforward: I track incoming texts, and you tell me which random code you sent. I match you up with an incoming text, and then log you in as that phone number.
Anyway, I think that’s very cool. Soon I’ll also build out the dining hall menus part of the app and release a TestFlight for some friends at Tufts.
This week I also added a post to ben.page: Learnings from JumboCode. JumboCode is this club at Tufts where teams spend the year building an app for a non-profit.
I’m a tech lead for one of the teams, and I felt like I wanted to document some things I kinda wish I’d known at the beginning of this year.
That’s all! I hope you have a great week.
‘till next time,
Ben