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!
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?
Main ones are text size and hiding read posts.
These are definitely on my list! For now you can use the iOS accessibility settings to change the font size, but I’ll look at implementing an in-app option as well.
Very well!
I’ll probably switch to it in a few updates. More power to you!
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!
Oops, got my apps messed up!
I have an iPhone 8 Plus, and Memmy became unusable on my phone as it became increasingly resource hungry (it uses React native). With this latest update, Aveleon is now my default app.
Thank you!
Same here, Avelon become my default app of choice very quickly.
Apps like Memmy and Bean ( I liked this app for clutter free experience and giving more fonts options especially “Avenire - Font ” ) are draining more battery in comparison to Avelon with the similar usage patterns.
Also I like the clean and minimalistic layout of Avelon in comparison to the more cluttered Memmy.
Can’t wait to see this app grow even more.
Thanks for this beautiful app developer.
Thank you so much for the wonderful app. It’s a joy to use.
Awesome update! This addresses so many things that are all very welcome. Thanks for your work :)
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!
Sharing a small recording regarding this bug here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SPBK7eGytpoBydrmdxNAKGfuAyvSNVrs/view?usp=drivesdk
Think I figured this one out, check out the latest build!
Can confirm the bug been squashed 👍🏽
Already loving the app for its minimal and clutter-free styling.
Just a small request, Hope to see a brand new app icon just before the App Store release ( I know it’s not a very important at the moment as you have other main features to implement. It’s just my personal request )
Will let you know if I encounter any bugs in future.
Thanks.
Nice, that was fast. Much better, thank you. I think you meant 1&3 :)
Yeah 1&3 is right :)
Much needed features not on your list in the OP:
- Marking post as read when opening the post’s image in the feed
- iOS share sheet integration for images (please, if someone posts an image, let us share the IMAGE, not a link to the image or a link to the post)
Once those two are implemented I will daily drive Avelon as I really like the performance and the haptic feedback.
Here’s a couple nice-to-have’s:
- community icons in the feed
- text posts in the feed need a default icon like Apollo, at the moment the layout shift is too drastic
Marking posts as read when opening the thumbnail should be a quick fix, will prob include in next build. Haven’t worked with the share sheet so gotta investigate that a bit first.
Not sure about community icons, makes the feed a bit too cluttered imo. Might look at adding it as an option eventually, but not a high priority atm!
Agreed re. community icons, it’s not gonna stop me from daily driving Avelon, but it does add a bit of nice flavour to the feed I feel :)
The latest build now marks posts as read when you open the thumbnail!
Based, thank you! Are you having any luck with the share sheet?
Haven’t gotten a chance to look at that yet!
This update is great I’m really loving the way this app looks and behaves compared to a lot of the competition. I was wondering if it’s possible to implement some kind of full width swipe back feature. Like the one in Apollo that lets you swipe to the previous screen from anywhere, not just from the left side. If I recall, you had to disable the other guestures in order to use it, but my memory might be fuzzy. Either way the app is fantastic, keep up the great work.
I’d love this too, but it might require a from-scratch implementation of the ios navigation system which is a bit much work when Avelon still lacks some important features. I’m considering adding a floating back button or something for now
Good news, found a way to do this and added it as an option under gestures in the latest build! For now it overrides all other swipe gestures, but eventually I wanna support left swipes too with this option.
oh wow that was a lot faster than I expected, thank you so much!
Thanks for your work on this release and on this app in general. Avelon becomes my main app to browse Lemmy!
The main feature that I’m missing is the ability to collapse all a comment thread with a swipe gesture.
Pull to refresh isn’t working on iOS 17 db 4. Not sure if it’s an iOS 17 issue or not, but just wanted to throw that out there.
Loving the app though, great job!
Huh, thats strange, thanks for the heads up. Gotta get a device on the beta soon…
Thanks for the update. The app is excellent to use and feels much snappier than Memmy.
Is there a way to upvote or downvote posts using gestures once you’ve opened them? I know there’s the three-dots button at the top, but a swipe on the post body would bea easier to perform on long posts.
Another suggest I have is adding an option to display the instance names on users and communities.
Good idea, I’ll add swipe gestures to the post when you open it as well. For now you can tap the small upvote button once to upvote or twice to downvote, but it’s a bit small to hit consistently perhaps.
I’ll can add an option to always show instance names!
Awesome! Thanks for the quick response :)
But eh… Is there a way to post? For the life of me, I cannot find the button to create new posts.
Not yet!
Will it implemented at the next release? Asking because I want to use the Avelon exclusively :)
Probably in the next big release, haven’t started yet though so not sure how much time it will take. I’d like to make the posting really nice so that might take a bit of time, many complex forms like these get clunky and difficult to use in my experience.
Sounds good! Can’t wait…
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!
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 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!
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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.
