Bubbles for Discourse

Inspiration

A better way to interact with the Swift Forums. A challenge of getting into any forum is fear you're doing it wrong, and then "am I in the right place." While the forums are useful and literally progress the Swift language, they can be difficult to navigate.

What it does

You can view the latest 30 posts of any Discourse community, (including the Swift Forums). View details of a single post, seeing the replies, and that is it! That is all I had time for, and it's unformatted, but shipped! I have a lot more to do in the future, but an exciting roadmap ahead.

How I built it

Hopes and dreams that fell short, but survived.

SwiftUI for the iOS / iPadOS interface. Using the DiscourseAPI.

Challenges I ran into

I spent far too long trying to make the Swift Open API generator code work. When in the end I just did my own individual network calls. I thought too long on how to get authentication to work, and I didn't even ship with that, because authenticated API calls weren't even needed.

Time, always never having enough time, which truly I didn't due to personal issues, but I still worked through it all to get something together.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I have a wildly hectic schedule, traveling during 2 different weeks in August, and 4 different countries in September, yet I still managed to ship something coherent. I documented my journey on all social media and made a quick blog post summary of each short video

YouTube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLomLuS7LD16f-4AsEbzXX8qmeslZUz5q5&si=xcIhJoMOf2MTJAJ3

Blog: https://mikaelacaron.com/shipaton-2025-building-bubbles/

What I learned

Always keeping it simple, and having better time management. Watch out for next year, I'm gonna knock it outta the park and win.

What's next for Bubbles for Discourse

Updates to the current app, of course formatting, and improving the individual experiences on iOS vs iPadOS and later adding macOS. The app is going to feel native on each platform, prioritizing the right features, and not just a webview wrapper.

Built With

• claude
• discourse
• swift
• swiftui