Pargi is going 3.0 and Open-Source

Cliff notes: Pargi is waiting for an update, to be completely rewritten, and become open source on GitHub. What follows is a brief background on my motivation for doing this.

Pargi was one of the first apps on the small-yet-innovative Estonian app landscape, it kickstarted my interest in software engineering and opened various opportunities I would not have had otherwise.

Initial 1.0 version of Pargi was uploaded to Apple on July 12, 2010, at that point about 3 months of on-and-off-again work had been put into it. It was released on July 20. What followed were about 2 years of updates, bugfixes, new bugs, redesigns and rewrites. In September 2012, I made the decision to stop actively developing the application and focus on other ideas and projects instead.

Over time, the user base of Pargi has declined quite a bit as competing apps have come about and made strides with new approaches to the same problem. Nevertheless, according to Apple, about 100 sessions are still done daily via the app, which taking into account the size of the Estonian user space, isn’t half bad.

About 2 years ago, I originally had the idea of rewriting Pargi, this time in Swift and as an open-source project that others could learn from. As with any side-project, it got put on hold more than once, however, the idea of having it be open didn’t surrender.

I remember, as I was going through my first Objective-C book, how I enjoyed the example code, expanding upon it and experimenting with it. I believe in learning through experimentation is far more satisfying than trying to start from scratch. Not only because it’s quicker, but also, because making small changes whilst immediately seeing changes to a real application is just a lot cooler.

While perhaps a bit too ambitious, I’d like to think that seeing Pargi’s code might inspire someone to write their first app (or inspire them to help me out with Pargi 😜), similarly to how seeing code examples motivated and inspired me.

In short, you can find all of Pargi’s code and data on GitHub, where hopefully the future will bring discussion and collaboration. Most importantly, it is eagerly waiting for a helping hand, one that would help it live another 7 years on the App Store! 😍