MNIST Maker App

• 11 March 2021
• Machine Learning,
• OSS

Currently, I am working on my bachelor thesis which will be an automata editor for iPad. I needed to recognize some shapes drawn by the user and for that I am using the exquisite framework by Apple, CoreML. But I also needed to create a custom dataset for some of the shapes - and I could not find anything that fit my needs!

What I needed #

I needed quite a simple app, actually:

• it should be for iPad
• I want to use my Apple Pencil to draw given shapes
• exporting images to iPad Files app
• scaling the image to a given size
• making the image grayscale

Solution #

Well, as you might have guessed from the title - I have not found anything that fit those needs. Alas I built my own solution!

It turned out to actually be easier than I expected.

Long story short, I had to

1. Create PKCanvasView and wrap it to UIViewRepresentable, so I could use it in SwiftUI
2. Add export button and TextEditor for specifying resulting image size
3. convert image to desired size + to grayscale
4. save it to documents 🥳

Result #

You can check out the code on Github.

To install it on your device, download the code and install it via Xcode. I did think about putting it on AppStore, and I still might do so in the future, but for the time being I'll keep it on Github only 🙂

Let me know if you'd like to see any improvements or if you stumble upon any issues!

Below, you can see a quick GIF showing off the functionality:

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