I’m excited to announce a new project I started working on late last year. It’s called Burton for Bluesky, a fully-featured iOS and macOS client for Bluesky.

Why a New Client?

I love Bluesky, it’s the social media platform a lot of us have been waiting for, especially in the wake of failures from Instagram, X and Reddit. The user growth behind Bluesky has been astronomical, the small powerhouse team builds the application with React Native (and Expo) to deploy to Android, iOS and the web to serve over 29 million users. This presents a challenge, their flagship application has to adhere to so many constraints across with so many form factors their application has become homogenous, not every gesture or animation feels appropriate for iOS or macOS.

Focusing on one subsection let’s Burton serve a distinct part of that user base with more precision. Building a purely native application for Bluesky and the ATProtocol offers an opportunity to make an experience that feels like it belongs on your iPhone, that can be docked on your Mac and windowed in your iPad. The only way to do that for Apple’s platforms is to build with Swift (and SwiftUI) from the ground up and that’s what Burton does. Accessibility more closely tied to VoiceOver, smarter caching mechanisms, background tasks, native rendering methods, all easier when you go all in on a native stack.

Everything Bluesky does is open source and it encourages this type of diversity it wants to be the starting place for users to find workflows that make sense for them. Consider the flagship app for Bluesky the water that they serve you at the table when you sit down and consider Burton to be the gin and tonics you order from your server, wonderful, perhaps, but certainly not for everyone.

Timeline

Supported Devices

The rollout schedule will focus on and in this order:

1. iOS
2. macOS
3. iPadOS
4. visionOS *
5. tvOS

In regards to the Apple Vision Pro, I’m not sure what state visionOS will be in towards the end of the year or what’s planned for the next release of that product line. But whatever state it’s in, I plan to support it.

Planned Features

Beyond the features available in the flagship app I plan on some unique features:

• Saved / synced drafts
• Handoff Support
• Alternative App Icons
• Share Extension
• Profile Notes
• Offline support
• Spotlight support
• VoiceOver support
• Scheduled posts*

Subscription Plans

There will be a tiered subscription plan, with a Free, Pro and Supporter tiers. I don’t have any pricing plans firm yet, but there will be a free tier that should be adequate for baseline use cases and tiers will be priced based on similar apps.

Testflight

Testflight links will be released some time in early Februrary. If you’re tight with me, you’ll get one in your DMs very soon.

Etymology

You might be wondering why I called this application Burton of all of the things I could’ve named it. I’m going to apologize because this is a convoluted answer to a simple question. I really struggled to name this project, I looked at names of deities related to the sky and weather, meterological events, the base words behind the @ symbol, even thoughts about Mothra, the kaiju monster; but absolutely nothing stuck.

Fun fact about me, I can’t really listen to music while I code. I can’t, music is far too interesting, too distracting. Typically, I’ll listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Around Xmas I listened to one of my favorite author’s books A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, narrated by LeVar Burton. Then I thought, “Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high,” the theme song from Reading Rainbow, a program LeVar Burton hosted for more than twenty years. Then I kept referring to this project as “Burton for Bluesky” in my notes and I really really loved it, something finally stuck.

Even if you didn’t grow up with the Reading Rainbow program, take a moment to appreciate the theme song. If you went to public school in the United States, you saw this program a lot anytime it rained or the teacher was indisposed.

A Personal Note

For the last decade, I’ve been working with TypeScript, React and React Native, taking the opportunity to build with Swift in a vertically integrated stack is like a daydream come to my waking hours. I’ve been loving Swift and feeling like I’m finally engaged all of my acumen at once, design, engineering, product management. But I do need to warn, this app will be a one-man-band style operation.

I would especially like to thank and acknowledge my family for supporting me during this transition: my father his unwavering support, my favorite cousin for his Wawa runs and casino nights, my sisters for their well-timed energy drinks I find in my office fridge. And to all of them collectively, for their blissful indifference to tech — it’s the perfect respite I didn’t realize I needed.

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I’m so excited, see you on the open skies. 🦋 🌈