Hi everyone!
First of all thank you for all the amazing feedback I have gotten so far. I was a bit overwhelmed by the response on my first release, but I’m happy to see so many people enjoying Avelon. This update addresses a ton of the most common feedback I have received with a lot of useful new features including swipe gestures, a new inbox and a new subscriptions page.
Changelog
- Swipe gestures for posts and comments
- Fully customizable! Head over to the new gestures page in settings
- Quickly perform actions such as upvote, downvote, save and reply
- Also added swipe gestures to various other parts of the UI
- Inbox to view your replies
- Quickly respond using gestures
- Quickly open the relevant post
- New subscriptions page
- More compact, grouped alphabetically
- Not a tab any more (reachable by swiping back in posts)
- Community links now work in-app
- Added ability to save comments
- No way to see saved comments atm. Coming later!
- Added customizability to thumbnail position
- Add option to enable more sort options (6 hours, 12 hours, 3 months etc.)
- Add option to show both upvotes and downvotes
- Added ability to save etc. from within a post
- Add swipe gestures to the in-app-webview
- Add purple accent color (yellow too in previous build)
- Reworked navigation system (no longer brings you to a different tab unexpectedly)
- Restructured settings a bit (will be more changes here over time)
- Fixes issue where your own votes would often be counted twice
- Fixed some typos
- Fixed alignment issues with tab bar
- Fixed overflow issue with some posts (hopefully)
- Attempted to temporarily fix ios17 reply crash
- Lots of other things I probably should have written down earlier
Screenshots
Known Issues / Future Features
- Adding posts
- Viewing profile pages
- Viewing saved comments
- Blocking/filtering
- Multiple accounts
- Adjusting text size
- And more stuff!
Replies have been crashing on the iOS 17 beta and I’ve added a temporary fix that hopefully resolves this (though it lacks markdown highlighting). I’m not on the beta yet myself so unable to verify or add a proper fix for now, will look at this once I get a device on the beta.
Given how many features this update adds, I do expect the build to be a bit less stable than before. If you encounter any bugs/crashes I really appreciate your feedback, either here or through testflight.
Hope you enjoy the update, and let me know what you think about all the new features!
I like the communities view, but maybe there should be a confirmation dialog when swiping to unsubscribe from a community? Just accidentally unsubscribed from one and have no idea which it was :/
Ouff yeah that sucks, I’ll add a confirmation or perhaps just remove the swipe gesture from that screen entirely. Thanks for letting me know!
Are you planning to introduce mark read and hide?
For sure, I’m noticing I need this in my feed as well. Not sure exactly how it should work tho. Perhaps a “hide/show read posts” option in the top right menu or something, what do you think?
You could probably give us an option to have read on scroll, like or comment.
Then the hide, I feel that either hiding the read posts automatically or giving us a hide read button is best. I prefer a button, but if you could squeeze in both and give us users options, that will be best.
Thanks for responding man. I’m using Avelon since day 1 and I can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it.
Yeah good idea, probably best with a toggle and an option in settings to hide read posts by default.
No problem, feedback is great and its very motivating to hear that people like the app. Stay tuned, I’m finishing up a new build the next couple days with a bunch of pretty cool stuff!
Thanks man! I forgot to add, while you’re at it, maybe you would consider adding a favorites in the subscribed communities.
I’m always looking forward to your new releases. Rooting for you
Favorites is a good idea, thought about that earlier but forgot. Will add, probably per-account would be best
Per account is great! Looking forward to it. Thanks man!
I’ve used Avelon exclusively for about a day now, here’s my feedback thus far:
- Your implementation of NSFW blurring in the feed is the best I’ve seen across all Lemmy apps I’ve tried. I hugely appreciate the red [NSFW] block and the additional safeguard before loading the feed. 10/10, absolutely perfect.
- Performance is, as I’ve mentioned previously, also the best across all Lemmy apps I’ve tried.
- The haptics are very enjoyable; excellent implementation.
- I love that you can see the formatting as you type it in your comment, rather than having to gamble on using Markdown correctly and then editing your post when it inevitably looks wrong
- The scroll box for the comment you’re replying to is a good idea. The UI is even better than Apollo’s, where IIRC you couldn’t actually read the comment you’re replying to AND write at the same time.
The only other request I have, other than what I put in my other post which is already on your radar, is to add a swipe action for “collapse top comment”. In Apollo and Voyager, you can swipe to collapse the top comment of a comment chain. For instance, if I swipe on this comment: https://lemm.ee/comment/1591116 it would act as if I tapped to collapse this comment: https://lemm.ee/comment/1565013 - hopefully that makes sense!
Awesome, nice to hear which features are good (often everything that already exists is kinda just taken for granted :p). Pretty happy with the reply view so far but also wanna have markdown tools and text selection for quoting, but that’ll have to wait for now
I know exactly which gesture you’re talking about, probably my most used gesture in apollo. Worked on it earlier but had some issues so I decided to put it aside for a while
I switched the reply and bookmark swipes, that saved my muscle memory from other apps :)
By the way, will inbox unread checking / indicator be added any time soon? It wasn’t until I fat fingered opening Voyager I realised you had even replied, haha.
Hmm that should already work, weird. I did have a few bugs with it but thought I’d fixed them. Saw an indicator for your reply just now!
Regarding feedback, here’s some smaller things:
- bottom nav bar is much better already, I still think the margin on the left and right of the icons should be way smaller than the margin in between the icons. It looks quite odd compared to every other nav bar
- I‘d like to see posts and comments in one feed underneath the account tab (or somewhere else easily accessible). Maybe it’s just me though
- after jumping somewhere via the quick switch menu, the back button should go back to where I was coming from. It should add the new view to the stack, not replace the current one
Point 1 & 2 should be fixed in the latest build!
[Bug] The app won’t always shows the complete list of subscribed communities properly…
I mean it misses out the subscribed communities sometimes even after the refreshing and I have to search the community and re-subscribe again…
Fun-Fact, Just now I re-subscribed to Avelon App community for the third time as it was not showing in my subscription list 🙃
[Edit] Just noticed that the Avelon App community which i just re-subscribed would disappear from subscription list once I refresh the app…
Hmm, not sure what this could be, never seen the bug myself. I’ll look into it, thanks for the heads up!
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Thanks! Not open source but I’m open for any questions if you have privacy concerns etc. There’s no tracking at all except the crash log stuff that’s built in with Testflight, pretty sure it’s opt-in so the most important thing to consider is just the instance you browse.
Very well done!
App looks and feels really good already! I’ll still keep using memmy, but you are getting your app so close to apollo that I’ll probably soon switch over.
Thanks! What’s the features you’re missing to switch over?
The main features I care about right now would be adding posts (which you mentioned), favoriting communities on the communities tab, and being able to search for posts and not just communities. But the UI looks amazing and this app rocks so far!
