Since 2006, I’ve spent countless hours developing free utilities for the web and for mobile devices. I started with small add-ons for Firefox 1.5 and have been churning out something new every year since then.

As I’ve gotten older, my life has gone through many professional changes. I’ve gone from…

This past week, I found myself in need of the ability to support the opening of URLs in multiple third-party browsers on iOS (e.g., chrome, firefox, etc.). No one-stop shop solution existed, so I took it upon myself to do it myself. I present you with Freedom 🦅, the freedom to choose other browsers! Currently, Freedom supports opening links in Safari, Brave, Google Chrome, and Firefox. I have plans to add support for other browsers over time.

At present, Freedom targets both iOS 9 and iOS 10. As Swift 4 and iOS 11 are on the horizon, I’ve added Swift 4 support, which can be accessed via the swift4 branch.

Freedom is available via CocoaPods, Carthage, Swift Package Manager, and directly on Github at https://github.com/ArtSabintsev/Freedom.

Since the beginning of 2017, I’ve had time to make a lot of OSS contributions — more than usual, including the creation of a couple new libraries. I’d like to take a moment and share them here.

Contributions to other libraries

• Swift: I made my first contribution to Swift! I added the implementation and…

At present, Swift’s Foundation library is lacking a lot of useful String manipulation functions. Many of those functions are needed in server-side development. Earlier this week, I began fleshing out a library that addresses this problem — Guitar.

Presently, Guitar has just around 30 functions, is fully documented, and is fully unit tested. It’s been tested with iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and server-side apps. I would love for this library to become a powerful tool in every Swift Developer’s arsenal. To do so, I need help from the community to make this library robust.

If you’re interested, please star it, fork it, or open an issue/PR at http://github.com/ArtSabintsev/Guitar or at http://sabintsev.com/Guitar.

A month ago, we at The Washington Post released Floppy Candidate, a free app for both iOS and Android. I led development on the iOS app and I thought it would be fun to share some statistics (specific to the iOS app only) on how we’ve done.

Since December 14…

I just submitted a PR to the Swift-Evolution project. The proposal is about arrays and how their interpreted in variadic functions.

Here’s the link to my proposal.

Zephyr is a Swift library that does two-way synchronization between NSUserDefaults and NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore. Zephyr allows you to synchronize either specific keys or all of your NSUserDefaults with one line of code.

Zephyr.sync() // Synchronize all defaults
Zephyr.sync("FirstKey", "SecondKey"...) // Synchronize specific keys

Zephyr also has a built in a monitoring system that allows you to register certain keys to be synchronized immediatley when their value changes.

For example, if you register one or more keys for monitoring, Zephyr will automatically synchronize those keys to/from iCloud the moment your app is notified of their change.

More information can be found on the github page.

About a month ago, I joined the @GetNarwhal team. The iOS app we’re building is a client for Reddit. Today, we released v1.5.4, the first version where my contributions are live.

The entire list of features can be found in the release notes on the App Store, but here’s a quick highlight of some of the features I added:

• Tap the Narwhal icon for fast theme switching
• Regex parsing and hot-linking of subreddit (/r/) and user links (/u/)
• Improved sharing to multiple aspects of the app
• Improved private messaging UX
• Support for opening links in Google Chrome

There’s a lot more in our pipeline. If you have any feature requests, feel free to ping me, Rick, Ken, or the @GetNarwhal account on Twitter! Also, feel free to leave a post on our subreddit. Lots more to come!

Download the app here!