Context

The concept for Pigeon arose because I frequently found myself scrolling through lengthy chats to find things like event plans, meal ideas, or gift requests that had previously been discussed, only to find that it was long gone. The original intent was to create a tool that would allow me to ‘pin’ these messages somewhere in iMessage. However, due to the unfortunate (but unsurprising) restricted nature of Apple’s iMessage APIs, it became clear that a pinning concept was unworkable from within the iMessage extension sandbox. Due to this, I settled upon a note taking space in which messages could be quickly copied and pasted.

Architecture

From a development standpoint, Pigeon is structured as an iMessage extension utilizing the MSMessagesAppViewController subclass. However, instead of building a standard SwiftUI interface, I opted to use a WKWebView, which allowed the front-end interface to be built using React. This hybrid approach gave me greater flexibility in design and functionality.

One of the more technically interesting aspects of the project was implementing web-to-native communication. By linking the React front-end with Swift code on the back-end, I was able to achieve smooth interactions, such as dynamically adjusting the screen size or enabling iMessage sharing directly from the (React) interface.

Rich Text Editor Integration

For the note-taking space, I wanted to ensure users had a rich text editor that was both powerful and easy to use. After considering various options, I chose to implement TipTap, a headless editor framework built on ProseMirror. TipTap proved to be an excellent choice, offering a flexible, customizable editing experience while abstracting away many of the complexities that typically accompany rich text editor development.

Future Plans

Currently, Pigeon relies on Firebase for its database and real time synchronization. However, I’m considering migrating to Supabase in the future. This would be more of an exploratory change, aimed at seeing how Supabase compares in terms of performance and developer experience.