Mastonaut is a client for Mastodon, the distributed social network with over 2 million users worldwide.

I enjoyed using Mastodon a lot in the past already, but I felt that the experience could be better if I were using it from a desktop app instead of a web browser.

So I started this project back in December 2018, and six months later it made its way to the Mac App Store. Mastonaut has already gathered a significant user base, and I've since updated the app several times to add more features. It is an ongoing project that I work on during my spare time.

It is a Cocoa app written mostly in Swift, with some logic that's bound to strings and attributed strings processing in Objective-C for performance. No third party libraries are used, with the exception of MastodonKit (a library for the Mastodon API) and SVGKit, to render SVGs on the fly.

A lot of technical effort was placed on making Mastodon's custom animated emoji look good in the app, since most other clients (including for iOS) simply display their static versions. This is a whimsical feature that is technically difficult to implement well in Cocoa/AppKit, but I deemed it a worthwhile one, and in the end it looks great.