Revaluating Sber Zvuk Media player

Are.na is a place to save content, connect ideas, and create collections.

Users primarily interact with blocks, which are pieces of content containing images, videos, pdfs and more. These blocks can be added to various collections, which are known as channels. This process is called "connecting".

This model of building webs of knowledge over time has led the community to describe it as "a garden of ideas", or "playlists, but for ideas". For me, it acts as my digital notebook of inspiration and ideas, and I use it almost everyday.

In October 2023, I was in the process of learning SwiftUI, and thinking of what to build as I went along. Are.na's mobile app came to mind – it had always felt a little slow and buggy from my and other users' experience:

It's built with React Native, which is known to be less performant than native solutions, with more compatibility issues as well. So I found myself thinking that this could be a good opportunity to build a new iOS app for Are.na with SwiftUI.

The current Are.na app

In terms of feature parity, the current Are.na app is more or less on par with the web client. It's serviceable, but I found myself only using it to check my feed and notifications, and occasionally connecting things.

I'm not inclined to do anything outside of that because of the aforementioned performance issues and bugs. There's also friction involved with the workflows I'm most interested in, namely diving into rabbit holes, connecting things quickly, browsing blocks, and saving images.

With those in mind, I began hashing out some ideas, bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements that I wanted to work on.

Feedback and Feature Requests

There is a public channel set up by Are.na for feedback and feature requests, which acts as a forum for users to express what they want to see fixed and/or implemented. I kept it close by as a reference throughout development:

To organize everything, I used Linear for issue-tracking, compiling all the relevant feedback and requests I got throughout the development process.

I tagged each issue as either a feature, bug fix, or improvement. This system allowed me to leave no stone unturned when it came to improving the overall experience of the app.