I haven’t been posting here about Arctic updates, and I realize that is a little counter productive towards building an active community here. So I would like to change that and start posting about changes in each release, and about active development.
I have been trying to wrap up a release every couple of days, and keep them coming as frequently as I can manage. Each update I try and throw in a mix of bug fixes and new features or quality of life improvements. I believe at this point I have all the crashes fixed except one, which I’ve received a good number of crash reports about. The crash usually happens after refreshing the posts feed when letting the app sit in the background for a while. Unfortunately I’ve not been able to reproduce this crash which makes it difficult to resolve. However I do know where the issue originates, and I hope to have it resolved in the next update.
What’s next?
In the next update I’m planning a few new features. First and foremost, is private messages. Currently, you can view private messages with Arctic, but there is no way to reply or create messages. I’ve been putting it off because I don’t have a clear idea of how I’d like to design this. I’ve never been a fan of the Messages app-like design within an app like Arctic, so I’m thinking of implementing it more like a forum than a chat app. Im also planning to add in UI support for post and comment reporting, as this is a critical feature that should already be implemented if I’m being honest. I’ll hopefully have instance sidebars added in the next update as well.
Going forward
Within the next couple of releases I’d like to tackle some of the biggest issues within Arctic currently. First is state synchronization. Currently the app state is poorly managed: for instance you can open a post and vote or comment on it, and back-out to the feed and the UI will not depict the changes. This is rather cumbersome task as UIKit does not have proper binding like SwiftUI does. But I have a good idea of how I will manage this.
The second issue will be improvements to scrolling performance in posts feeds. This is also a tricky task as UIKit does not handle changes to cell height in tables very well. Currently, Arctic tries its best to prefetch images before they are displayed to prevent having to resize visible cells, but dependent on network conditions, this may not always happen in time and it can cause some jumpy scrolling. I may never completely negate this issue without the the lemmy API providing image dimension data in the responses. However, I have some options for improving this that I have yet to try.
Lastly, I’d like to address issues with links being un-tappable in some posts. This one is really annoying, and honestly I’m just going to throw out the current system and rewrite the system using official techniques.
Some more thoughts
Once stability and core features are a bit more polished, I’ll be focusing on design. Currently Arctic is quite static in design, but I’d like to offer a bit more user control over appearance. Things like app-wide color themes, comment color themes, customizable action/swipe menus, etc. while implementing all of this, the settings section will also get an overhaul and be a little more organized.
I’ll also be working on implementing mod/admin tools. This is likely going to take some time, as there is a lot to implement, and familiarize myself with. I’ll keep everyone up to date on my progress with this when the time comes. I may also seek out some mod/admin users to test these features in a private testing group to avoid issues
Anywho, I didn’t intend on this being such a blanketed post, so I will leave it at that. I’ve included change-logs below as I’m not sure if anyone reads release notes in TestFlight releases. I’ll be sure to make a new release post here every time I release an update going forward.
Thank you, to all of the users. You’ve all been great. Our numbers are still quite low at the moment, only 153 testers at the time of writing this. Hopefully I can bump those up with the coming releases.
v0.1.8
- Fixed videos failing to load in the media viewer if more than one video is in the list
- Fixed crash when trying to share a video from the media viewer (for now, only the link will be shared. I will add an option to share the video file soon)
- Fixed videos not posing when swiping to the next page in the media viewer
- Fixed the search bar not always showing on the initial load of the Search tab
- Fixed issue where some community icons would fail to load
- Fixed issue where some animated images would not animate in the full post-view
- Fixed issue where link previews would fail to display a default icon if a site favicon is not found
- Fixed markdown not being applied when opening the post editor
- Added loading indicator in the media viewer when loading videos
- Added support for cross-posting (option is available in the action menus)
- Added a community selector to the post composer, for changing what community you are posting to
- Added support for scrolling to the top when pressing the posts tab while it’s already active
- Added option to open the post composer when long pressing the posts tab
- Added reply context preview to the Reply Composer, for viewing the context in which you are replying to
v0.1.7 hotfix
- Fixed crash when pressing the cancel button in the Search view
- Fixed placeholder text not hiding in the post editor when editing an existing post
v0.1.6
- Redesigned Post Editor UI
- Fixed issue that could cause the login screen not to recognize when username/password was pasted
- Fixed crash that could occur while trying to scroll the subscriptions view before it’s loaded
- Fixed issue causing some comments to be truncated (cut short)
- Fixed layout issue causing odd behavior with the statusbar on non-notched devices
- Fixed an issue that could cause some animated images in the post feed not to animate
- Added a Upload History manager for deleting previous media uploads
- Improved error messages to be more descriptive
- UI now depicts when an upload is in progress
- Media in comments can now be opened in the Meia Viewer
- Index scroller in the Subscriptions view is now easier to grab
- Increased tappable area for user/community labels in post-cells
- Tapping the stats section of a post cell now opens the post
- Improved success rate for losing YouTube videos
- Improved image-loading behavior in the post feed
- Hopefully, TOTP tokens will now be auto-filled when using a password manager to login
v0.1.5
- Added compact post option (work in progress)
- Added a network monitor that will show when no network connection is available
- Added inbox paging, inboxes will now load more content when scrolling
- Added placeholder icon for users avatars in search view
- Updated Search and Profile styling to match that of the post feed (spacer between cells)
- Improved performance when scrolling posts in search and profile views
- UI now shows when you’ve reached the end of a feed, or the feed is empty when browsing posts
v0.1.4
- Fixed account switcher positioning issue that occurred after switching accounts
- Added Guest Mode to the account switcher
v0.1.3
- Added option to disable video scrubbing gesture
- Added upload history tracking to manage media uploads (No UI Yet)
- Fixed a crash that could occur while parsing username links
- Added image upload support to the markdown editor
- Provided default icons for communities without an icon
- Added BOT badge to post cells for showing bot accounts
- Community cells in the search tab now show more statistics
- Added option to override the interface style (light/dark)
- Added some experimental swiftUI views
I’ve been tempted to do that, as I would like to get the user count up. However I wasn’t sure if I should spam that community with update posts. I did cross-post the initial release in [email protected], and I think I will also post about v0.2.1 over there due to the added iPad support being a big feature.
I’m not really sure where else I should be posting though. It seems that other apps all have a rather large user base, and I’m not sure if Arctic was just late to the party, or if I’m missing something else. Marketing and self-promotion is not my strong suit.
I guess it’s mainly because there are already a few popular apps, like Mlem, Memmy, Bean or even the webapp Voyager that were available very early when all the users came from Reddit, like me. All of them are already available at the AppStore which may helped them gaining a larger user base.
I would really love to see Arctic becoming a big player as well since I really love the performance and UI. It’s already my favorite app (besides Avelon and Mlem).
Maybe you can attract new users with unique features that are not available in other apps (like a multireddit-like feature, so users can group similar communities from different instances, eg. all the “gaming” communities).