Before you dive in, make sure you'll start 2026 the right way. Track your new year resolutions in style, with the right tool. I built addTaskManager exactly for this, but you can use it to track finances, habits, anything.
There’s something quietly powerful about staying with a project long enough to see its deeper needs emerge. In a world obsessed with pivots and launches, we often overlook the value of iteration — of living with the code long after the dopamine rush of version 1.0 has faded.
Over the past few years, while building and evolving addTaskManager, I found myself returning again and again to the same piece of UI: the humble table view cell. It sounds simple — just a row in a list — but in a productivity app like ours, it’s where the real interaction happens. It’s where tasks are created, reviewed, rescheduled, and often abandoned. That surface deserves attention.
At first, I did what many developers do: I created specialized cells for different contexts. One for simple task names, another for tasks with due dates, one for showing context and priority, and yet another for long descriptions. Each one had its own quirks, bugs, and maintenance footprint. And each one added a tiny bit of friction to the development process.
But because I stayed with the project, I didn’t settle for that.
Over time, patterns emerged. I noticed that almost all task cells could be expressed with a combination of a title, an icon, a badge, and up to three pieces of metadata. With this realization came simplification: one parametric cell, infinitely configurable. Working seamlessly on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
That cell is now MetaCellKit — a Swift package born out of repetition, refinement, and eventually, elegance.
What MetaCellKit Is
MetaCellKit is a highly flexible, card-style table view cell that supports up to three metadata views, automatic date formatting, and dynamic layout adaptation. It powers all the task lists inside addTaskManager, from simple master lists to detail-heavy project overviews.
It’s more than just a visual component — it’s a reflection of what it means to polish something through repeated use. Every corner radius, shadow offset, and content compression rule was tested not just in theory, but in the daily grind of real users and real workflows.
Why Open Source It Now?
Because after all these years, the component feels stable. It feels right. It solves a problem without getting in the way. And I know that if addTaskManager needed it, there are likely others out there building similar tools — task apps, note-taking interfaces, settings panels — who are stitching together multiple cells when they don’t really have to.
MetaCellKit is my way of giving back a piece of the path I walked.
A Quiet Invitation
If you’re building something that lives in a list, take a look. Clone the repo, drop it into your project, and see if it saves you a few hours — or a few headaches.
Even more, if you’re at the early stages of a product or side project, know this: staying with it might teach you things you didn’t expect. Not everything worth building comes fast. Some of it comes from showing up, again and again, to the same piece of code and quietly making it better.
And maybe, someday, you’ll extract a small gem from your own journey — and share it with the rest of us.
Explore MetaCellKit on GitHub
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