First, please let me know if you’d rather these be elsewhere—new to Arctic but really liking it.
I’m on a quest to find the perfect Apollo replacement since leaving ‘that place’. Arctic is so nice and close I know this is nit-picking now. But the image view was practically perfect in Apollo and just a couple of tweaks if they’re possible would bring that joy back.
First off, hiding the phone status bar and action buttons on first open—just the image, scaled to fit.
For zooming, double tap to zoom in is great, but Apollo had single tap to zoom out again which combined with swipe to dismiss made getting back to the feed almost a single action—effectively a double tap with drag on the second tap. It was so slick.
The action buttons don’t currently show / hide on single tap when zoomed in so I don’t think that change would break any existing functionality.
That all sound fab, and I’m on the TestFlight version so happy to check when it’s available. So grateful for your efforts on this. I have some other minor stuff I’ll share as new posts too to see what you and others think.
I released this update last night. I noticed after releasing that it’s not quite what you were looking for as there is a small delay between tapping to zoom out, and when you can swipe to dismiss. I’ll see if I can tweak that a bit to make it a little more fluid.
Thank you for all the feedback you’ve provided! I’m looking forward to seeing your other suggestions.
Also, minor bug in tap to dismiss. Try zooming in and then dragging a very small distance—it’s interpreted as a tap and zooms out.
That’s fab—I think the delay might be because double tap is still active and so it has to wait for the timeout before emitting the single tap. Don’t know how easy / performant it would be to unregistered for double tap when zoomed in… I also wonder if the zoom transition might make it feel a bit more smooth too—it’s quite jarring to snap back.
The other changes are great though. I’m not sure I’ll use the tap drag to zoon much but I did notice it shows the action buttons—probably have to reset / disable that on detecting the drag after tap?
The jarring zoom out was not meant to be included in the release, I was testing to see if the zoom transition was interfering with the dismiss gesture and I forgot to re-enable the animation before releasing. I can definitely block the double tap while zoomed though, that may be the solution to the delay in dismissing.
I’ll see if I can’t resolve some of these issues right now and maybe release a hotfix tonight.
That’s great—the image open / zoom / dismiss flow is really smooth now, thanks for taking me back to the best days of Apollo :)
The only two minor niggles, neither of which are high priority at all, are the phone status bar (don’t know if that can be hidden in portrait), and the ‘small drag’. That last one only happens if you move a zoomed in image by a few pixels. It looks like the touch and release point being close to each other is interpreted as a tap regardless of how long it takes.
BTW, can you tell what I do for a living :)
Awesome! Glad you like the improvements. I ended up writing some custom gesture recognizes to handle some of the issues and it seems to flow a lot better now.
I did add another small tweak to the tap gesture this morning that cancels the gesture if the press is longer than a fraction of a second and it also cancels if the touch is moved during the press. I had this in last night’s release, though the timeout was not working properly, and the movement threshold was a bit too high to work as I intended.
As for hiding of the status bar, this is the default behavior. I believe I may have disable this on non-notched devices, but I will have to look back to be certain. What device and iOS version are you using? I’ll test in the simulator and see what is going on.
I’d assume you work with front end development in some way (UI / UX) or perhaps QA testing, if I had to wager a guess. You seem to be finding all of the minor little details that make a big difference for the users.
Yeah, front end UI dev and testing :)
I’m using an SE 3 model A2783 so notch. Note the status bar is a minor irritation in regular view when hide bars is set for scrolling in the feed. The top and bottom button bars go but the status bar overlays onto the post. It only happens in portrait, so I assume that’s an iOS thing.
All the other changes are superb. Thanks again for your efforts on Arctic.
Yeah, that definitely makes sense
I misunderstood the status bar issue. I was under the impression that it was not hiding when opening a media preview. I did some testing hiding the status bar when scrolling, and it does work, though it causes some strange behavior, and the animation is choppy. I’ll do some more testing with this and see if I can’t get it working smoothly, but there is not much I can do within the API.
I can live with it in the feed view tbh—there are some glitches when the bars are set to hide in feed view I that they obviously have to come back when opening a post. That makes it a bit janky so I’ll probably leave them visible tbh.
But status bar in media view would be great to hide if that can go.