After a massive reorganization and recruiting almost 20 new developers and designers from the community, we've made a HUGE amount of additions and improvements to the app, with many more to come! Yay!
NEW ADDITIONS
Redesigned interface! NEW POSTS, COMPACTS POSTS, ALL THE THINGS!
Updated Settings Tab
Tap to collapse comments/threads
Long post text is now truncated so they don't take up your whole screen. They will have a maximum height.
Increased contrast between post/comment cards and background
The way the application interacts with the Lemmy API has been improved, this should reduce crashes in multiple places
BUG FIXES
Tapping community links will no longer crash the app, instead an alert shows saying they're not currently supported (we're working on it now, it needs a few different chunks of work completed)
Duplicate/looping posts when scrolling feeds should no longer happen 🤞
Rapid scrolling through feed should no longer cause crashing 🤞
Mlem icon is now brighter!
KNOWN ISSUES
Some images may extend beyond the post card bounds in Card View
In compact mode, link previews may not load
Comments still have old up/downvote buttons
MORE TO COME
Full a11y compliance which should work perfectly with iOS's Accessibility functionality like Guided Access and Screen Reader. (Thanks to contributor Weston for your expertise and audit!) Note: we weren't able to work this into the current build because of the constant changes to the interface, but some/most of it should be in the next build!
New Profile Tab and Messages Tab
New & improved fullscreen image viewer (not ready in time for this release)
Inbox notifications (not Push, as that takes more work-- more on that later)
Colored thread indicators
Swipe-to-vote
Post/comment saving
Updated NSFW tag/blur
Again, please keep in mind that this is an early beta. As such, it's not feature-complete and there will be bugs and unexpected behavior. Enjoy testing, and we look forward to hearing your bug reports via TestFlight and your feedback! You can comment here or come chat with us in The Mlem Space on Matrix.
PS, and because lots of people have asked-- Mlem app will never support iOS 15. Sorry, but we'd have to rewrite the app from scratch, and that's not something we're gonna do. Additionally, kbin support isn, for now, out-of-reach due to incompatibilities between the kbin and lemmy APIs. Although this may change in the future, for now, it's not going to happen.
Please remember everyone that Apple still treats TestFlight builds like AppStore releases, it has to go into review first once it’s accepted you’ll be able to see the update :)
Yes and no. In this case, the delay is because we updated the version number (0.0.6 —> 0.0.7) instead of simply the build number (which we also bumped to 23). This is what triggered the review. Hopefully it will be a short process!
20 new developers! Damn. Thanks for the hard work, everyone.
It’s somewhat exciting to be a part of this journey so early on; Lemmy will obviously continue to change as it adapts to an influx of users, so I’m sure you guys have your hands full. Looking forward to the continued progress of the application.
I hope in the future we can choose have thumbnails on the right so we can click them easier and the left side text can all begin at the same point, cleanly aligned. And self posts etc won’t need a thumbnail, which will cut down on the busy and rigid look.
In the future we plan to offer many more customization options, including which sorts of posts get thumbnails and which side thumbnails show on. It's not in active development right now (we've got some core features like NSFW blurring that have higher priority), but I built the post display with customizability in mind so you have my guarantee that it's coming.
Looks seriously great. Lots of improvement. The crashing stopped and has been replaced by errors. Presumably issues with the server rather than the app.
The compact view looks slick. It would be better if clicking the thumbnail brought you directly to the image such as in apollo.
I'd also love swipe gesture for voting.
The 'new post' constantly having the url for your other brew app is pretty unwelcome. Especially in its current form where it looks like a hyperlink. If it was gray and user-typed URL text was white, it would be much more acceptable.
yeah, some lemmy instances are slammed and throwing SSL authentication errors, and this is the response. we're already working on creating more robust error handling and changing the UX for those errors. it's very annoying, but we can't control the lemmy instances and whether they're up or down. what we can control is how the app reacts when it experiences an error, so we're working on making it less annoying!
Yeah I’m not even seeing replies (on the web version) from other instances any more. It’s weird because just browsing communities (on web) still works fine for me.
Unfortunately Mlem hasn’t worked once for me since the update, but perhaps it’s just a coincidence that it happened at the same time.
Do I have to make accounts on multiple instances for things to work or should I just wait for scalability improvements?
This app looks slick! Unfortunately I was too late to join the TestFlight beta. Is there a rough ballpark estimate when we might see this app on the App Store? Keep up the good work :)
Hopefully this update will allow me to login to lemmy.world and try your app out! I'm excited about this platform and the apps to come along with it.
Also, if there is one feature I miss from Reddit (or was it an Apollo feature?) is the ability to hide posts you've upvoted/downvoted. Right now I like to use the "top of day" for my subscribed feeds on lemmy, but if I read the top posts, close the app (I use Memmy at the moment since it's the only other iOS Lemmy app I'm aware of), and come back later, it's all the same content for the most part. Upvoting/downvoting posts you read encourages to interact with a post and also keep your feed full of new content.
I think this will be pretty hard to do, partly because of the federation… I don’t even know how to approach it, except for saving the identifier of all interacted posts, but I guess that wouldn’t scale… maybe it would be simpler to implement it as a server-side feature?
It’s an Apollo-only feature, Reddit doesn’t natively do this.
I’ve been thinking about this feature for a bit, and it seems a straightforward implementation would be to store “seen” post identifiers with a TTL. Since the data is just bits of text, it should not take a lot of storage on device, and the TTL takes care of cleaning up. Since most posts on Reddit would be bumped away from any type of feed within at least a couple of days, a TTL of a week or shorter would probably work for Apollo. Not sure about Lemmy right now though.
I’m not a mobile dev, so would not know exactly how to implement a system like this for Mlem, but if it was a webapp I would use Redis (if server-side) or something like local storage or cookies with TTLs (if bowser-based offline).
Great update so far! Love having compact view as it was my preferred choice when browsing reddit. Just wanted to feedback that there's a tad delay when using gestures I.e. swiping from left which is a bit jarring compared to other apps like Memmy
Great update. The app stopped crashing. Also gotta say… didn’t know that I wanted symmetrical up/down votes but now that I have them,never want anything else.
Looks great. Much more usable. One thing that might be nice to have at some point is a search feature, or a way to quickly access communities that you follow (may already be planned for the profile page I guess?).
Great work so far though and looking forward to more features in the future. 👍🏻
Awesome updates! Just downloaded and looks like some really nice additions to the feed view. Appreciate all the hard work everyone has been putting in on this!
I would love a setting to control post height, and a long-press to collapse. It’s really nice seeing full posts in the feed - it’s a big change from reddit where so many users don’t even read articles. I do think the default should have a cap as you’ve outlined but options (if they’re maintainable) are always good for users
I've just updated from 0.0.6 to 0.0.7, but found it wouldn't show posts. I kept seeing "Something went wrong. Sorry, something unexpected happened. Please try again."
I signed out and in again, and now I see "Mlem couldn't fetch you account's information. File a bug report."
I see an existing issue https://github.com/buresdv/Mlem/issues/181 which might be related. Should I create a new issue, or describe what I'm seeing as a comment on that issue?
honestly, it could be this, or it could be load timeouts from overloaded instances. it's difficult to tell the difference from our end because the LemmyAPI isn't very good at telling us what caused an error, so we have to triangulate it ourselves. whichever it is, we're looking into it, so no need to file an additional report. thanks, though.
As all 3 instances were working before the update and are still accessible in the browser, I'm kinda assuming that it's a problem caused by the update?
I already shared feedback via testflight, but the error message is very generic.