Punchlinez

Punchline
Paywall
App Icon

Inspiration.

There are tons of run of the mill quotes apps today. I found out about the Ship-a-ton competition a bit late but figured I'd give it a shot and try to ship another simple quotes app with a twist - hiphop and rap music lyricism and punchlines!

What it does

Shows a curated list of awesome punchlines by the world's finest lyricists with a nice, distraction and clutter free user experience.

How we built it.

I wanted to use the latest Apple APIs for it so it uses SwiftUI and SwiftData. Not many iOS18 only APIs in there after all as it wasn't necessary but it uses the new MeshGradient view as background which is pretty and computationally cheap compared to the old way of doing it. Built with strict concurrency checking in Swift 6.

Challenges we ran into.

Time as I found out late about this competition and wasn't able to start well into September. Just got it approved on app store in time for the original deadline. Happy it got extended to be able to get some more optimizations in.

Accomplishments that we're proud of.

Utilizing SwiftUI and some of the latest APIs I was able to ship it in just two weeks of work when life offered time. Looks great and is among the best looking Quotes apps out there and offers a good user experience comparable or better than similar apps but is combined with a unique lyricism element and music discovery.

What we learned.

Learned about Revenuecat, first time using it. Very easy to set up and works well, will definitely use again. Also got a few frustrating learnings about Apple App publishing administation.

What's next for Punchlinez.

The main functionality that is missing and really should have been part of the MVP is saving favorite quotes into a collection. This is the next priority and work has already begun, perhaps by the time you will read this a new build is out with this already.
Another addition which is already on it's way is URLs to Spotify and Apple Music for available songs in addition to the already available lyrics link to genius.com. This is a fairly time and manual consuming data management task that was deprioritized from the MVP.
Another fun addition would be to be able to add your own favorite punchlines.
Next is a widget showing punchlines to spice up your device a bit.
With more time I would also have liked to test out Swift Multiplatform skip.tools with this project but that was never close to be possible time wise this time.