Announcing the Blorp Mac App Preview – Available to Test Now!

Blorp is at a stage where there’s still plenty of work to do, but I’m ready to start gathering feedback. The main areas that need improvement are enhancing the post creation experience and adding the ability to sign up directly through Blorp.

That said, Blorp is already very usable. I’ve chosen to launch the Mac app first because, among all the Lemmy clients, the desktop space is the least saturated. I’m starting with Mac since that’s where I’ve done all my testing, but the plan is to expand to Linux and Windows as well.

I’d love for you to download Blorp for Mac! If you’re not ready to install it yet, or you’re not on a mac but still want to check it out, you can use the web version at blorpblorp.xyz.

Did I mention, Blorp is open source? You can read all the code on our GitHub.

Other platforms coming soon:

  • iOS
  • Android
  • Linux
  • Windows
    • @[email protected]OPMEnglish
      2•22 hours ago

      Alright, guess I’m launching the iOS beta. You can join the TestFlight here.

      You have no idea how much that means. I’ve spent hours and hours fighting virtualized lists on one platform, only to have to solve it again on another platform. iOS currently has a bug where there are random gaps in the feed. But overall it’s also pretty usable.

  • UlrichEnglish
    2•24 hours ago

    I’ve chosen to launch the Mac app first because, among all the Lemmy clients, the desktop space is the least saturated

    What benefits does the desktop app provide over just a website?

    • @[email protected]OPMEnglish
      3•23 hours ago

      Right now:

      • Uses a native key value store instead of IndexDB. So in theory you shouldn’t get the Voyager database error (if you use Voyager)
      • Ability to bypass some borwser things like CORS, allowing me to embed Loops videos. Fetching from loops.video from 3rd party domains is blocked in the browser.

      But you raise a good question. Maybe I’m better off focusing on a PWA, as that will simplify cross platform deployment.

      My goal is really to provide the best expierence cross patforms as I can. I’ve built the app in a way that will allow me to deploy it to a lot of paces. I’m mostly decided on the UI, but not nessesarily how I distribute the app (natve or PWA).

  • @fox2263English
    1•21 hours ago

    Neat. Excited to try it on my Mac tomorrow.

    Major wants from me would be (for iOS) ability to hide read posts, mark as read in scroll, and ability to share any media really easily. This is what made Apollo top tier.

    Fantastic work so far! Real smooth and fast!

    • @[email protected]OPMEnglish
      1•18 hours ago

      Join the TestFlight for iOS if you haven’t already!

      I’ll probably ship hide read posts in the next update sometime next week. iOS lets you long press to share media, but I need to add that on the desktop app.

      By mark read in scroll, do you mean you manually mark things read in the feed? Or something else?