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.
Nice, I’m glad that’s working for you. I’m sure you are not the only one that has had that issue, so like I said, I’ll change that in the next update.
Awesome to hear you’re enjoying it! I’ve not spent much time in any other Lemmy apps, so I’m not exactly sure what kind of features they all have. Is there any features you find yourself missing that I could look into adding?
Nothing special, some customization options to fine-tune the app to personal likings, like hiding voting buttons, compact post image sizes (or none), hiding read posts, or to toggle some options per community instead of globally.
An awesome feature would be if Arctic could remember collapsed comments and keep them collapsed after revisiting a post.
I also noticed that you can tap the little downvote arrow to downvote a comment, but you can not tap the little upvotes arrow to upvote a comment.
Customization is coming, I’ve just not prioritize it yet. I’ve been primarily focusing on core functionality so far. I’ve been trying to reach a near complete feature set to support all of Lemmy’s features before moving on to the customization aspects.
I have a ton of customization features I’m planning to add in, and hopefully I can start on those soon. I’m also planning per-account settings as well, though I hadn’t considered per-community settings. That’s a good idea.
As for remembering comment collapse. I actually added support for this, I basically just need to save the state so it can be restored. The last update was already running late, so I didn’t take the time to add that in. I’ll likely include this in the next update.
Honestly the tap to vote on comments, I might just disable that entirely, I’ve noticed that majority of the time I accidentally vote on comments, and the tap area is too small to be reliable. Are the least, I will at make it optional.
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!
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I’ll definitely add an option to remove child comments when removing a comment. For this I will just add an additional toggle to the remove comment pop up. It will prepend “[Thread Removed id:
base_comment_id]” to the reason. I actually stumbled upon another moderator requesting native support for this in an asklemmy post today.So, I’ve added a ModLog shortcut to the community action menu, so that is more accessible now. I’ve also added an all filter to the ModLog. I’m working on redesigned ModLog cells, as they are a little difficult to read right now. I based them on the web UI, but with a narrow screen, it doesn’t look great. I think I will rework them to look similar to the Report List and a bit easier to read. I’ll add more detailed information and action menus while doing this. This will include an undo action to reverse the action and some other useful actions. I’ll also see about adding a search function so you can filter by moderator and such.
Id also like to add support for adding/removing mods, and transferring communities, but I haven’t quite figured out where to fit that in.
Oh wow, I used Apollo from day one and never noticed that feature. Was it an option like peek parent that would show a popup with the parent comment? That definitely sounds useful!
Thanks for the awesome feedback as always.
Yup, that will definitely work and sounds much more intuitive than having it as a separate item in the menu.
Yea, the webUI leaves a bit to be desired. I’m definitely up for cramming as much info into the modlog as you can. It’s not something people are browsing just to flick through and usually only being looked at for more details on some mod action taken. Showing the name of the person taking the action and an icon for if they’re a mod or an admin would be awesome! Also worth noting, the ability to see mod names is a server setting. Many servers might have it enabled so that all users can see mod names.
Ah, that’s a great one I had totally forgotten about! I don’t know if it’s possible in Lemmy, but if you can add a mod from their user profile and not have to make them make a post or a comment that I have to hunt down then that would be awesome! Right now Lemmy doesn’t support relative links (at least I don’t believe it does) so if I post something on LW or my own instance and I give that link to someone who’s a mod on lemm.ee and ask them to make me a mod… they actually need to either use the search or manually find the post / comment (either in the community or from my profile) in order to mod or unmod me since the LW or personal instance link I give them will take them to that instance… where they’re not a mod and potentially don’t even have an account.
Yup, exactly. If you long pressed on a comment it would open the context menu and perk the parent or the text of the post itself if it was a top comment (not 100% sure on the top comment one, but that would be useful regardless). I used it more than I realized and really missed it when I got to Lemmy lol
No problem, feel free hit me up with any questions or clarifications :)
Alright so I’ve reworked the mod log a bit, and the readability has improved. I’ve also added more details and collapsible content so it’s not quite so overwhelming. I included some
, and an undo option for all the mod actions (still working on undo for admin level actions). There is still some UI work to be done, but it is definitely an improvement already.I think I’d like to work on some admin tools next, but I don’t want to try and tackle all of them at once. I’ve had a busy schedule lately, so I don’t want to prolong releases anymore than they already are. I was thinking to add support for reviewing user applications first, but if you have any suggestions on frequently used admin tools that I may want to start with, just let me know.
As for adding/removing/transferring mods, I’m not sure what limitations are due to the api, and what may be just UI limitations, but I will look into it. I know one limitation is that a community can’t be transferred to a user on a different instance than the community.
The parent peek option should be very easy to implement, I should be able to add this in the next release no problem. Most of this is already implemented for viewing context when replying, so I just need to add an option to preview it. This also gives me an idea for the comment compose view, where you could view multiple parent comments for context while composing.
I’ll hopefully have the next release pushed out on Tuesday evening this week.
Oh nice, that interface looks really slick! Definitely really like seeing the extra information in there. The undo option will definitely be useful for accidental taps and save a trip to the web interface.
No worries, the pace you’re turning out new features is awesome and I’m sure the admins of various instances would love some admin tools on their phones. There’s not a ton of admin settings, at least in the web-UI. I’d imagine the option to defederate from an instance by showing an item in the dropdown list from a post/comment/report might be something they’d use that isn’t in a web UI. They don’t do it often, but I could see the need for a quick action needing to be taken: EG defederating from an instance with CSAM. Also, they should be shown the option to make new admins when tapping a user as well as a site-wide user ban option. Mods see ban from community, but admins can see a ban from site option. Also purging content is another admin option. It’s a step above a mod removal and totally deletes the data from the database as well as images. Should be shown as a context option for comments, posts and communities.
I’m not super up to speed on how transferring mods works. Is that just changing the order they’re in on the mod list? Sweet, looking forward to seeing the peek option in the update!
Two small other things also came to mind. I mentioned above that the “open in browser” button opened the federated link instead of the local instance link. I also noticed the same is true for the “share” button on the posts. It might make sense to have this be something that the users can set in settings: “Use federated links for sharing and opening posts in Safari” or something.
Also, I found a bug in the “top” view for comments. For some reason looking at this post makes only 18 of the 22 comments on it visible when sorting by “top”. But both “new” and “hot” will show all 22 comments. I couldn’t find any others where this happened, so this must be hitting some weird edge case. Here’s the federated link and here’s the link on my instance, I tied both and saw the same result both with a local account and my LW account. I don’t think anything around the API changed for 0.18.5, so I doubt the recent update is what’s causing an issue.
