Arctic v0.2.1 is now available on TestFlight
Arctic v0.2.1 is now available on TestFlight
Arctic v0.2.1 is now available for testing on TestFlight!
Sorry for the delay with this update, it took longer than I had originally planned. I’ve had a busy couple or weeks, and have not had as much time as usual to work on Arctic. Additionally this update was larger than past updates, with larger features and more commits than any of the previous updates. In the future I will try and keep the updates coming more frequently,
Notable new features
This update comes packed with some exciting new features. Arctic now has support for iPad layouts (split view, slide over, full screen). This is still a work in progress and will improve in future releases. Collapsible comment chains are finally supported, tap or swipe any comment to collapse it’s content and children. Mod tools have also joined the party! You can access mod actions when viewing content from any community you moderate. Just open the action menu for any post or comment for quick access to (ban user, remove content, speak as a mod, feature or lock a post). You can also review and resolve user reported content in the new Mod Zone accessible from the sidebar, and community action menu.
Mod tools and iPad support are still a work in progress and any feedback on theses features is more that welcome.
Less notable new features
Arctic now has Lemmy Explorer (lemmyverse.net) built in. This allows for browsing and searching thousands of instances and communities inside Arctic. Currently, you can access this through Lemmy Explorer in settings. However, I’m working on integrating lemmyverse databases directly in the Search tab, and in the Community browser to allow for better search results, and increase community discovery.
Media viewer action buttons are working now, not much to explain here. You can now vote, share, save, open in browser, etc directly from the media viewer.
Upcoming features
Better iPad support. I plan to add support for 3 column layout, and a context aware sidebar. I’m also working on adding support for multiple windows, so you can browse multiple accounts, or use mod tools while browsing etc. this may take some time and likely won’t be coming in the next release.
Mod tool improvements. Better UI support for moderation, currently the UI doesn’t properly update for all mod actions. Additional convenience actions for mods, such as speak as mod, and feature posts etc before submitting the post/comment.
Comments feed, view instance or community comments in a feed similar to the posts feed, this is to match the web UI.
Chat mode for comments. Disables hierarchical comments to view comments with absolute sorting. Additionally, child comments of deleted or removed comments are not shown.
Adaptive layout. Currently long usernames, or deep nested comments, etc cause some wonky UI, where elements will overlap. I’m working on adding better support in these cases to allow the UI to adapt.
Accessibility improvements. Voiceover should already be working fairly well, however there are a lot of areas for improvement. I’m working on going through the whole UI to ensure all elements are properly supported.
State synchronization. I know I’ve mentioned this before, and I haven’t gotten to this yet. I have a pretty good idea of. How I’m going to handle this, it’s going to take some time to implement though.
Customizable swipe actions. Adding support for user customizable swipe actions. This will also come with distance based triggers rather than the current drawer style swipe actions.
Until next time
As always, thanks to everyone for testing Arctic and providing feedback. We still have a fairly small community here, and I would like to increase engagement, so everyone feel free to post any feedback or suggestions here.
V0.2.1 changes
v0.2.1
- Added support for collapsable comment chains
- Added split-view iPad layout support (also supported on full size iPhones)
- Added option to select app layout (iPhone, iPad)
- Added Moderation options to post and comment action menus (must be a moderator for the community)
- Added Mod Zone for viewing post/comment reports, and resolving them
- Added Lemmy Explorer for browsing communities/instances
- Added support for uploading images from the Files app
- Added support for loading video thumbnails (WIP)
- Added option to save, copy, or open in browser any media
- Added swipe actions to the posts feed
- Added option to select text from the detailed post view
- Added support for refreshing the profile page
- Added open in browser option to community feeds
- Added alert for viewing detailed account score, and account age
- Redesigned settings page, and organized options
- Increased the posts feed page size
- Optimized image loading, and memory usage
- Refactored the profile view and added support for viewing save comments
- Fixed posts with no comments not displaying a no comments message
- Fixed issue that could cause community feeds not to load on certain instance
- Fixed issue where canceling an image upload would result in an infinite loading screen
- Fixed crash when deleting an image from the Upload Manager
- Fixed search bars on iOS 16 to match the layout of iOS 15
- Fixed layout issues after device rotation
- Fixed media viewer action buttons not working
- Fixed issue where posts would fail to load due to unencoded urls (matrix urls)
- Fixed crash that could occur when submitting a new post/comment
- Fixed sidebar banners displaying the icon rather than the banner
- Fixed comment reports opening a post report
- Fixed alerts displaying underneath the media viewer
- Fixed moderator list in profiles always displaying your own moderator list rather than the selected user
- Fixed crash that would occur when adding or changing accounts
- Fixed delated/removed comments always displaying "deleted by creator"
Loving the iPad updates — your UI was already the best one for horizontal orientation with the magic keyboard. Collapsible comments means this is now the only app I'll be using.
Will hiding read posts be a thing sometime? Not a dealbreaker but I do like it as a feature.
Awesome, that’s great to hear! I’m glad your enjoying it. This also reminds me, I need to look into adding support for keyboard shortcuts.
I can see about adding support for hiding read posts in the next update. It would be very simple to add in. I’ll also see about adding a quick toggle to show/hide read posts directly from the feed.
Thanks for the support and feedback!
Thanks for the update and adding swipe gestures for posts and collapsing comments!
Collapsing posts in single post view would be a nice feature, also I noticed that the index does not work:
My pleasure, this was a fun update!
I hadn’t considered collapsible posts, I can definitely add that as an option. As for the section index, you have to long-press then swipe to trigger it. I think I will change that in the next release so it doesn’t require the long press to activate.
Thanks for the feedback, I added both of these to my todo list.
Oh, long pressing works! Nice to know, thanks.
I never tried that, I guess I was used to the default iOS behavior where a default tap triggers the section index.
I am excited for future updates, this is my favorite Lemmy app now even though it has less features than other apps. I really love the smoothness.
Not that it important but do you know when time will be shown? Currently all time is shown as “?”
This is the first I’m hearing about this issue. Is this happening everywhere for you, or only in specific areas? I am aware that the new Lenny Explorer has this issue, but I haven’t noticed it anywhere else.
It’s everywhere
Loving the new mod tools, excellent update! Really loving the app so far and eager to see where it goes.
A few more "really nice to have" options for mods if you are looking for more:
- Nuke thread (recursive delete), this feature is missing from the web UI so it would be super awesome if the app had it (you'd just have to recurse through the posts under the "nuked post" and delete them since the Lemmy backend doesn't have a "nuke" option I'm aware of
- Modlog for each community rather than just server-wide (server-wide one is nice too), would also be awesome if the modlog had the ability for me to undo the mod actions in it if needed. Lastly, the filter in the server modlog is missing a "show all" option.
Also, the "Open in browser" button opens the federated link and not the local one from the instance the user is on (ends up bringing you to a lot of random instances)
That’s great, I’m glad you’re enjoying the update. I see you moderate some big communities, so I’m definitely eager to get your feedback on the mod tools.
I’m actually in the process of fixing some issues with the mod tools right now. I had some reports of crashes that I believe I have resolved now.
For the nuke thread option, are you referring to post removal? For example, if you remove a post, you also remove all comments on that post? If so that seems straight forward, and doable. These would show up as separate mod actions under the mod log, and as such I would probably append text to the mod reason to state it was removed with the post, and not due to the content of the comment.
Now when restoring a post after nuking it, I’m not sure if the api would allow me to restore the nuked comments as well, but I can look into that.
As for the community modlog, it can be accessed from the sidebar for each community. I will also add it to the action menu for each community so it’s more accessible, and consistent with the server modlog.
I’m working on adding an all filter in the modlog right now. I didn’t add it initially because the modlog was a somewhat last minute addition to an update. I also noticed while testing mod tools that I performed an action that I could not undo (even in the web UI) and I had to hard code a solution to roll back the action. So I think an undo option in the mod log is a very good idea.
I’ll look into the open in browser option as well. That should be an easy fix.
Thanks so much for the feedback and suggestions!
No problem, Lemmy is all about working together so I’m happy to offer up any suggestions or feedback to help you out :)
For the thread nuke option, it wouldn’t need to be for a post. When we delete a post, nobody can see the comments anymore on it. It would be a context menu on a comment that has children comments (replies to it). Any comment I “nuke” that has replies would have itself and all replies to it removed (it’s fine if they all get the same removal reason or something generic like “thread nuked” or just blank reason). An example would be someone makes a really bad and rule breaking comment and others start to reply and quote parts of that comment, engage the troll or just derail into a totally inappropriate topic. In that case, that first comment and all replies to it need to go, but deleting them one by one isn’t very fast. The “top comment” isn’t always a top level reply, sometimes that top level comment is a few replies down.
The nuking isn’t a thing we need to do a lot, but there are occasional cases where it needs to be done, unfortunately.
Ah yes, you’re right, I totally missed it haha! Yup, the modlog is awesome for each community. I guess only feedback I’d have there would be to have the mod name that took an action visible in it. I don’t think it was, but I don’t want to close the reply while I’m writing it to double check :P
One other feature I remember from using Apollo on Reddit was when I opened the context menu on a comment by long pressing on it… it would show the comment it was a reply to. It was nice when reading a long list of comments, you could get a little more context if the comment someone was replying to was immediately above it (IE the reply isn’t the top reply to a comment so there’s others in between). It’s hard to describe, so I can give some more info if you want.
Will keep daily driving the app and let you know what I come up with! Keep up the awesome work!