Introducing Citations: An easy way to cite sources for academic papers

I hated Citation Machine, so I made my own

Today, I’m overjoyed and thrilled to introduce my new app to the world: I call it Citations. Citations, in short, is an easy way for anyone to create properly formatted citations for bibliographies in academic papers. You know, these ones. Bleh. Nobody likes citations — I don’t even think teachers do. But if you’re a student or writer, or heck, even a teacher yourself, chances are you’re probably fiddling around with them everyday. Picture this: you’re in the middle of an intense writing session before 12 AM midnight in a race to finish a paper you worked so hard on — you did so well, and you even made sure to keep all of your links handy to cite them. But one of 2 things happens as the clock turns over to 11:50; you either anxiously throw all of your links into the bottom page and give it the title “UH UH WHAT’S THIS CAL- BIB BIBLIOGRAPHY” and hit submit, or spend hours figuring out where the title and author are supposed to go, turning in your assignment late, and even worse, getting points off because you didn’t format the URL properly. Well, that’s exactly the problem I tried to solve. And solve it, I did.

Doesn’t this already exist?

This problem has been “solved” for years — or so you’d think. Online citation creators have existed for a while now, and they get the job done… just barely. I’m an avid user of a citation website called Citation Machine, a website introduced to me by my 7th grade English teacher many years ago that allegedly makes it easy and fast to create citations. There’s one small caveat; this website is one of the worst websites ever to exist on the internet. Head over there right now — you open the website, and you’re immediately flooded with Chegg ads for other services. *Yuck. *But that’s not even the worst of it; you know that dumb “this website is using significant energy” prompt that Safari shows when a website uses too much data and system resources, like for example, a website filled with more ads than content and autoplaying video while using your location and searching through all your cookies for ad-click info and plists? This takes it a step further than that; Safari automatically reloads the page after roughly 10 minutes because it’s too much for the computer to handle. This causes an endless reload loop that never ends and makes you want to throw yourself in a frying pan. *That was a weird metaphor; ignore that. *Point is, Citation Machine never works, and when it does, it sends you 80 different pop-ups telling you to sign up for Citation Machine premium for… $10 A MONTH?! FOR A CITATION WEBSITE?! This has to be a joke, what is this, California rent prices? Yeah, no thanks, bud. First, you blind me and make me deaf at 2 AM with your autoplaying video and obnoxious ads and restrictive content blocker policies. Second, you track me all over the internet, coerce me into downloading malware and thinking Adobe Flash is expired when that thing died 2 years ago, and look through my cookies. Third, you track my mouse movements using custom JavaScript to scream at me whenever I try to close the tab. And, AND, to add insult to injury, you make me pay $10 to cite my academic papers? Nuh uh — I had it with Citation Machine and every other citation website on the entire internet. So then what about apps? I searched high and low across Apple’s “safe” App Store which markets gambling apps to victims of gambling addiction with 1 app to be found, and that’s “Cite It Now: Easy referencing” with a star rating of 4.4 with 172 ratings. Seems good, right? Well, judging from the screenshots, this app looks like an Android web view made with Flutter from 2014, but more worryingly, charges $8 a year for its functionality, with a $20 IAP for a lifetime subscription. That’s not even the worst of it: the app is 25 MB compressed — for a citation creator. What could be hiding in such a large app for such a simple purpose? Ah, of course, trackers: this app’s privacy nutrition label has more trackers than grams of sugar in a Starbucks cold brew. That is to say, a lot. There is no way I would ever download this app. I needed a better solution to my problem.

Citation Machine; yuck.

So what did I want?

Not too much, actually. I needed the following requirements to be met by some magical angel developer:

1. A native, fast, and elegant app made for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS with support for all the latest APIs from Apple
2. An app with ABSOLUTELY no tracking pixels, analytics trackers, and cookie munchers, as I like to call them
3. An app which was free, notarized by Apple, and had no sleazy IAP subscription limits that bugged me into paying for a glorified text formatter

…well, I guess that’s a lot to ask for, apparently, because no magical angel developer actually came and blessed all of us students with an app that met my criteria. Dang nab it.

How’d I get the idea?

About a year ago, I saw a setup of developer Christian Selig with Xcode running his app, Apollo (check it out, by the way, it’s amazing) and some code flashing up on the screen. Immediately, my thought was, “why am I wasting my time on JavaScript when I hate development for anything else but Apple platforms?” Thus began my journey of learning Swift, and eventually SwiftUI, to the point where I knew how to build a little tiny app called “Ultra,” which was just a tiny thing with a modal sheet where a date picker showed up, and the date selected would show up in a text box. If the date was a certain day, the screen would turn a different color. It wasn’t an app I could ship, but it gave me the sense that I could actually do something with my Swift skills. Now, flash forward to Sunday, October 22 of this year. I was scrolling through Steve Troughton-Smith’s Twitter account when I saw he was doing one of his “what are you making” threads. I was doing this because it was around 7 PM at night, and I was procrastinating on finishing the bibliography part of my (otherwise well written) essay. Things suddenly clicked for me: what if I could make an app just like all of these indie developers, and show it off to this audience eager to try new apps? Instead of finishing my bibliography like a reasonable person, I went and downloaded Xcode again to start building this app. The rest of the night was spent typing away at my computer writing SwiftUI code to make an app that solved all of my problems, and would hopefully solve my bibliography procrastination problem too.

How did I build it?

Remember, I had a goal: 100% native on all platforms with no trackers. For this, I used SwiftUI. During the State of the Union at WWDC22, Apple made it very clear that AppKit and UIKit were no longer the stars of the show they once were. SwiftUI is here to stay, and it’s the way forward. It also removed the Catalyst hassle. Slowly, I was making progress. Obviously, like any developer would, I hit many roadblocks which made me question the whole project, but I got through them, learned new things, and kept trying. The best resource was Hacking with Swift, by Paul Hudson. Whenever I had a question about an API, this resource always had the answer. I could just copy and paste the code, tweak it a bit, and boom — my idea was executed. I’d highly recommend it for your SwiftUI journey. Another thing: throughout the whole process, I felt like I was doing something I hadn’t really seen described before — I felt like I was translating what I wanted done from thoughts to code. It was really fun — every programmer knows this feeling. SwiftUI, despite all of its hurdles and roadblocks, is very fun to write.

So what were those roadblocks?

I have multiple threads about the whole process as it was happening, so I won’t delve into the details about specific problems, but the biggest problem throughout the whole process, without a doubt, was getting my Apple Developer Account set up. Specifically, the ID verification part. Apple just wouldn’t verify my identity for a multitude of unknown reasons. One of which was when an agent found that my “US passport wasn’t from Florida.” I’ll be honest — I didn’t know how to respond to that at first. Alas, after multiple emails and days waiting for responses, not to mention the stress of it all, Apple finally approved my Developer Account after bickering about it on Twitter. Running to the press never helps, eh? Regardless, thanks to Apple Developer Relations for being so nice (albeit kind of annoying, I won’t lie) in all of your emails and being accommodating with my shenanigans, and I extend my sincerest thanks to whoever found my thread and sent it up the chain. You guys make Apple what it is. I get it, we all make mistakes, but thank you for working with me.

So here it is, Citations — the best way to reference and cite sources for your academic papers:

After a week’s worth of work and many more weeks of learning, bickering with Apple Developer Relations, multiple bowls of cereal, and multiple replays of Midnights by Taylor Swift, my new app, Citations, is finally shipping. Here’s what it looks like and how it works:

It starts off with gorgeous, native, and fast apps for iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura — all 100% written in SwiftUI. Each app feels native to its platform, with support for Stage Manager, multiple windows, and platform specific features like Apple Pencil Hover. And by fast, I mean absolutely ZERO wait times for citations. Everything works instantly.

Citations has support for 5 citation formats currently: MLA, APA, Chicago, IEEE, and Harvard. It formats each citation perfectly, with italics and all. It has multiple options to customize citations too, for example, if you don’t have author information (say you’re citing Wikipedia or something), you can exclude it and Citations will handle it.

Citations works without an internet connection with absolutely no trackers and analytics whatsoever. All of your citations and info are yours and will stay like that forever. I have absolutely no way of seeing what you do with my app.

Citations has absolutely no ads, in-app sponsorships, or any paid promotion whatsoever. No autoplaying video, either.

Citations is free with absolutely no extra in-app purchases, no tip options, and no strings attached. Once you download it, it’s free forever — I make nothing off of it. You will never need to pay me a dime for making Citations — just use it.

Citations has a beautiful app icon made by me, and a stunning indigo theme which is my favorite color. I think you’ll love it too — it looks great in light and dark mode, so it’s great no matter how you choose to use your device!

Citations has full support for Apple’s accessibility features, like Dynamic Type and VoiceOver. This way, everyone can use Citations — no matter how you use your devices to do amazing things.

A thank you

Lastly, I want to thank a couple people who have been monumental to this app’s launch.

• Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa, who make the Accidental Tech Podcast— without y’all, I don’t think I’d even know what SwiftUI meant.
• Christian Selig, Joe Hribar, Brian Mueller, James Thompson, and the many more independent developers who inspired me to get into app development— without y’all, I would have never made an app.
• Paul Hudson, who writes Hacking with Swift— thanks for making such a great Swift resource which taught me SwiftUI singlehandedly.
• The employees of Apple, who make the amazing products we rely on everyday to do our best work— leadership might be stupid, but y’all are amazing.

So yeah, that’s Citations — an app made for me that I want to share with all of you. It’s beautiful, privacy conscious, native, accessible, and powerful — it’s the ultimate tool for anyone who writes academic papers. You can get Citations for free through TestFlight, Apple’s beta software distribution tool through my link. I’d love if you gave it a shot and let me know what you think of it. I worked super hard on it, and can’t wait to see what you make with it and how you use it. Thanks for reading, downloading, and following — and stay safe out there in this pandemic thing.

Download Citations here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/ZJVAUAkR