Last night I finally sat down and started work on an all new version of PiBar. The 1.2 beta works for Pi-hole 6 support but the setup process was really rough and ready. This new version of PiBar has a “smart” Pi-hole setup form, where you can just put in your Pi-hole hostname and it’ll auto-detect whether it’s Pi-hole v5 or v6, and go from there.
The entire networking backend has been rewritten to use modern swift and I think in the process solved a persistent crash issue that has been dogging me for 5 years now, so that’s nice.
This is basically done already for v2.0, I was not planning on adding new features yet, so now it’s just testing and verification before I release it.
Well I thought I wasn’t going to add more features but I started fiddling with the ability to see recently blocked and allowed domains so you can allow/deny right from the app. A little rough so far design wise but it works well.
Screenshot of the #Preview of the window in Xcode.
In the interest of getting this out I’ve downgraded the scope of this project back to being just v1.2 and adding Pi-hole 6 support gracefully. So it’s basically finished, I just need new screenshots and an App Store description and video.
I’ve submitted it to App Review so it can go out to App Store users now. I submitted it kind of lazily, without one of my signature demo videos, so I might get hassled and have to record one but I figured I might as well be lazy and see if it gets approved to save myself some time.
Set up my docker pi-hole set up to run both v5 and v6 side by side with dnsdist to round-robin dns requests between the two instances so I can more properly test them for PiBar… very nifty!
having to manage all this software on an actual server back in the day must have been a bit of a pain. not impossible, but it’s so much easier to just spin up containers for every bit of software.
I’d somehow never hit the submit button on sending PiBar 1.2.1 to App Review, so I took care of that yesterday and as of today the update is up on the App Store!
