Welcome
Behind the Scenes with BloqLoft
My first post, so welcome! It's been a couple decades since I have written anything online in any capacity. So forgive any of my wandering, trailing thoughts that feel more like rabbit trails into oblivion than concrete paths of intentional direction.
For this first post, and introduction to me, let me briefly tell how any of this came to pass and what really started it all.
Why BloqLoft?
I wander the internet, a lot. I owned my own domain name in 1997, and I was building websites for people by 1998. Fast forward to 2018, and I wandered across this video of a lovely person showing how to design your own quilt with graph paper and map colors. In 2018.
I was flabbergasted.
I was like, this is crazy! We have ipads! We have tablets! We have so many cool things that could be so much better than this labor-intensive approach! There has to be some sort of software out there for this!
So I called my sis and she was like, "well yeah, there is. It's called EQ7 (at the time EQ8 had barely been out), and it's expensive."
I'm like, "there has to be something for ipad, surely."
Very Dear Sister: "Nope. [pause] YOU SHOULD BUILD ONE."
*To be fair, I believe Quiltology existed (exists?), but I had a much different vision, and my sister was like, need something *not like this.
I liked the idea of building something that didn't really exist in the form my sister wanted, and most certainly did not fit the vision I had in my head of what the shape of it could be, and how it could be brought to life.
So the mission was clear:
Create an app for the ipad that was fun, intuitive, and made quilt design easy.
And, just as important:
Millennials and the next generation(s) of quilters needed to be able to afford it without breaking their piggy banks.
Thus I began my journey of all things quilt app designing, and let me tell you what: I had no idea how big of a mountain I had chosen to start climbing!
Apple, iPad, and Swift/SwiftUI, oh my
This application was never going to be built before 2020, let alone before 2024. When my sister and I had that conversation in 2018, Apple's new language, Swift, was still very not production ready, fragile at best, and it was constantly in flux. It wouldn't be for another year or so that things were stable enough that companies trusted it to build with and ship products based in Swift and SwiftUI. It would be another two or three years before anyone could use just the Swift and SwiftUI framework (and SwiftData, et al), to build their applications and ship production-level material.
What I am able to do today with Apple's flagship language wasn't even completely possible even two or three years ago. I would have had to learn C++ and integrate an archaic framework into the more modern side of the application and that situation would always be a weak link in the entire build.
The amount of time it has been since the idea first seeded itself in my head to when it was mechanically, programmatically, and physically feasible has been years. But through those years I have kept researching, kept learning, kept taking notes, kept the idea alive.
And I have literally just waited for Apple to finish transposing older pieces of UIKit and other frameworks into Swift and SwiftUI so I could finally use them, and make a better, stronger product.
So to sum up:
- I'm never learning C++. No thank you.
- I'm building now just fine. Fall of 2025 saw everything start to come together and for the first time in years, I was making headway again.
More, more, more
There's a lot more to do: QA to finish, Beta testing to finish, so many things to button up, polish, re-tool, and test, test, test again. But we’re gonna get there, SOON, and it's going to be awesome.
