Your reading stays yours.
Surfboard collects none of your reading data. There is no account, no analytics, and no cloud copy of your subscriptions. The list lives on your device.
The web never agreed
on how to write a feed.
I’m Ian, the maker of Surfboard. The interface came first. The hard part kept moving underneath it. Atom and RSS put titles, links, dates, images, and article bodies in different places—and production feeds bend both standards in their own ways.
The result is BambooParsing, a Swift parser built without a third-party parsing package. It follows the XML element stack, hands Atom and RSS to separate delegates, and tests against captured feeds instead of ideal examples.
The first feed was only the beginning.
Early parsing handled a title. Then Atom and RSS needed separate paths, a shared element stack, entries, subtitles, article content, and one interface the app could depend on. That shared result supplies the reader with the parts of a story.
The parser had to stand on its own.
Separating feed parsing from the app's SwiftData model did not work cleanly on the first attempt. The design was backed out, rebuilt, and moved into its own Swift package. The app kept reading state; the package took on feed interpretation.
Real feeds refused to behave.
Captured production feeds exposed split text, HTML entities, relative content bases, and more than one common date format. Another regression caught URLs that returned an HTML page instead of a feed. Each case protects a specific detail, from readable text to working links.
Correctness still had to feel fast.
Loading many sources exposed a second problem: interface work could pile up even when parsing was correct. Topic posts moved to concurrent parsing, set-based read lookups, and batched insertions to coordinate how results reached the topic list.
That work is invisible on purpose. The reader gets a calm, chronological list—not the feed dialects, parser callbacks, detached tasks, and batched insertions underneath it.
Found a source that refuses to behave?Send the URL and what happened.
- 372
- Ian-authored app commits Across the app's recorded history
- 81
- parser commits Across the parser's recorded history
- 6
- captured real-world feeds Used as parser fixtures
- 0
- third-party parser packages Built on Foundation
Counts and implementation details verified against the BambooRSS and BambooParsing main-branch histories.
