Quine 3 - beta - for iOS, iPadOS and macOS - Invitation

#1

I hope it is okay to post this info / request on Talk TW - if not please just let me know.

Quine 3 is now in “beta”. It’s been in development for over a year, mostly waiting for various updates in macOS and iOS, all of which were resolved in macOS 15.5 and iOS 18.5. Quine 3 is a complete rewrite of the core Quine code, essentially modernizing to align with the broad direction of Apple Swift and SwiftUI - in terms of stability, performance, and portability. I’ve been using Quine 3 on macOS since the first draft app, about a week into the project; the same for Quine 3 on iPadOS. It achieves certain things that Quine 2 could not do, but which will become more important going forward, especially gearing up for other platforms and integration with things like Apple Intelligence.

At this time, I can take on a small number of beta users. I’d say a maximum of 5 for now. I’d like to move fast and get this into the App Store in a matter of weeks. I usually send out incremental builds a few times per week - and limit to once per day.

Please, if anyone is interested in participating in the beta, please message me here on Talk TW.

And to reiterate - if this is not the right place to be offering this, please just let me know. While the seed of TWEdit, and then Quine, was my own desire to have TiddlyWiki on iOS, the purpose quickly became far more focused on getting the tool out to the TiddlyWiki community. To the extent I can, I’d like to make sure the work tackles more than just my own limited needs.

Cheers - Chris.

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#2

Hi Chris,
This is the exact right place to announce topics like this one. And thanks for sharing you work with the community. I am sure it will be highly appreciated.

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#3

Hey Chris - exciting! As a daily user, I’m curious to hear - what platforms will the app support, besides iOS / iPadOS / macOS? What new features are you adding to Quine?

#4

The goal is any Apple platform - which is the reason for the big push rewriting everything in SwiftUI. For now macOS and iOS. One immediate side-effect is that Quine 3 now screen shares nicely with Apple TV, which turns out to be pretty handy for presenting directly from TiddlyWiki and entertaining friends and family with your latest TiddlyWiki filter expressions :wink:

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#6

I don’t see how to send a DM (I’m new), is there a link to download it?

#7

Hi - Thanks for your interest in this. The beta work on this is mostly on hold because interest was thin and there were enough residual bugs after WWDC this year that the effort working around them was too much. I may pick up again in a few months once I get some other software efforts behind me. I’ll reach out as soon as I start up development on this again, and have beta code to test. Cheers - Chris.

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#8

I’d also be interested and missed your post unfortunately. I’m a happy user of Quine 2. Thank you!

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#9

Hi Chris, just wanted to register my interest in Quine 3. One of my pet peeves with Quine 2 right now is I can’t run it on macOS so it looks like your Quine 3 development roadmap would address that! Happy to help test things when the project picks back up again.

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#10

Hi - And thanks for the interest. I spun up work on Quine 3 again in the last couple of days, and hope to have something to offer by way of beta soon. It’s nice to come back to the relative stability of Swift, after a long break from Apple development, focusing instead on the dark-side of Python, LLMs, and all of that evil.

I will admit that I became a bit despondent about iOS with version iOS 26. The whole animated transparency “thing” makes my head spin, with my iPad relegated to reading the newspaper and checking the weather - a mixture of unhappiness induced by the significant performance hit and the cognitive dissonance of glassiness.

Will update as soon as I have something that I am happy with re Quine 3.

C.

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#11

Hello! I am a daily Quine user (on iPad) and I want to thank you for making such a simple but useful interface to TW.

I generally love it, but there is one major frustration I have with the Quine 2 - it does not respect the playsinline attribute in a <video> element, with the video always launching into fullscreen mode. This happens on both iPhone and iPad.

This is not a problem with the browser engine, as playsinline is respected when viewing the same tiddly wiki file in Safari or Firefox on both
iPadOS and iOS,

It is frustrating, because I want to play a video in the wiki whilst continuing to interact with the tiddlers, but the video launches into fullscreen, obscuring the view of the wiki.

The only workaround is to put the video into picture-in-picture mode, and drag it to the edge of the screen, then at least the wiki can still be seen.

However I wish Quine would just respect the playsinline attribute in the same way Safari and Firefox do on iPad.

Is this a bug that you are aware of, and you think that can be fixed in an update?

Thanks!

#12

Hi - and thanks for the suggestions.

I’m in very much focused on Quine 3 right now - with no plans for further development of Quine 2 - so I’ll take a close look at video playback in Quine 3 asap, and do my best to do what you are asking.

Once I have something interesting for beta in this regard, I’ll let you know.

Cheers - Chris.

#13

Wonderful! I am really looking forward to seeing how Quine 3 will turn out!

Speaking of which, do you have any plans to introduce tabbed browsing?

I see two major productivity advantages to this:

  1. multiple TW files could be viewed in the same window,
    making it much easier to switch between wikis, instead of using iPad OS multiple separate windows, which are clunky for users to navigate around (not your fault, just the way iPadOS works). As an alternative to quine, I sometimes browse TiddlyWiki files in the iPadOS version of Firefox. Offline, local file browsing is possible in this version of Firefox if the wiki files are located in On my iPad/Firefox/Downloads. The experince of multiple wikis open in multiple tabs is a possibility which would be wonderful to bring to Quine 3!

  2. Firefox-style tabbed browsing also means that the link for an external resource (eg [ext[myfile.pdf]]) can be long-pressed, and the PDF can be opened in a new tab, allowing easy switching back and forth between the PDF and the wiki. I wish this was possible in Quine!

Anyway thanks for replying, and all the best with your work on Quine 3!