CreatureSurvive

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11649661

Download Arctic on the AppStore!

I am thrilled to announce that Arctic is now available on the AppStore! Looking back, it's amazing to see how much progress Arctic has made in the last six months. Initially, I began working on Arctic as a personal project to fill the void after leaving Reddit during the API fiasco. I had no intention of releasing it publicly. Now, I have a fully-featured Lemmy client, a fantastic group of beta testers on TestFlight, and an official release on the AppStore.

However, the journey isn't over yet. I have many exciting plans for Arctic, and this is just a significant milestone. Going forward, I plan to release more targeted updates on TestFlight and create a public roadmap for AppStore releases.

I would like to thank everyone who was involved with Arctic's TestFlight for all the valuable feedback and suggestions that have helped shape Arctic!

Links

• Website: getarctic.app
• TestFlight: testflight.apple.com
• AppStore: apps.apple.com
• Issues: github.com
• Community: !arctic@lemmy.world

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5508813

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"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3634233

After a few delays, Arctic is has finally been submitted to TestFlight and got the green light. For those of you who don’t know what Arctic is, it’s a Lemmy client for iOS 15+ built in pure Swift.

Arctic began as just a little side project for me. As an avid Apollo user I was missing a feature rich and familiar client for IOS. So I started working on Arctic. My primary goal with the project has been creating a native UI appearance, and content presentation, focusing on putting the important content directly in the feed without feeling cluttered. I’m finally at a point where I feel Arctic is stable enough, and houses enough features to go forward with beta testing.

I’m currently testing out Reimplementing the UI in SwiftUI as it allows for quicker iteration, and less boilerplate code. Though I’m not sure about performance yet. SwiftUI seems to be lacking in certain areas such as prefetching APIs for heavy feeds etc. you can find an experimental post feed in settings that uses SwiftUI.

As of right now, I have not set up an issue tracker for Arctic. The reason for this is that I don’t know for sure if I will be Open Sourcing the project yet. I’d like to keep the issues/project in the same repository, and I’m unable to have a private repo with public issues. I’ll be deciding what route I would like to take over the next week or so.

While on the subject of open source, I’d like to mention that Arctic does not collect any information from users devices. The only user specific information that is stored is the Lemmy account JWT Auth token for communication with the Lemmy api. Absolutely no personal information is collected, or leaves your device. Currently I have no plans to implement any analytics in Arctic, and if I ever do, it will be on an opt-in basis, and be completely anonymous only tracking information relevant to Arctic support.

Development

I feel the need to point out that I work a full time job, and am often busy outside of working. With that said Arctic development may be a bit slow compared to some of the other projects out there. I do however plan to release at leas one update every week for now. I will try to push out more frequently as my time permits, even if that means smaller hot-fix type releases. I do plan to support Arctic long term, as I’m already quite invested in the project and have really enjoyed working on it.

Anyways, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask questions, or offer feedback/suggestions . I’m quite busy most days, but I will do my best to respond as soon as possible.

Almost forgot the most important part, here is the link to Arctic TestFlight

Current Features

• Submitting / Editing Posts
• Submitting / Editing Comments
• Voting on Posts / Comments
• Blocking Communities / Users / Instances
• Subscribing to Communities
• Search (URLs, communities, comments, posts, users)
• Rich link previews
• Uploading images
• Rich Markdown Editor
• Community browser
• Basic guest (anonymous) mode
• Multiple accounts, and quick switcher
• Integrated Media Viewer
• Upload manager manage previous media uploads)
• In-line YouTube videos (experimental, this seems to have broken with recent changes to the YouTube api)

Known Issues:

• Some in-line links do not recognize taps, I’m looking into overhauling the Markdown rendering and may be switching to swift UI for this, as it is better suited for that task instead of UIKit
• State Sync, The UI does not update in all cases to reflect changes such as voting on a post, and then viewing it in the post feed
• Some media fails to load and is unhandled by the UI
• Scrolling performance needs improvement
• Long usernames/community names can overlap action buttons
• Fast scrolling can result in user/community icons showing in the wrong cell
• Videos do not display in image gallery previews
• YouTube videos fail to load at times
• No spoiler support at the moment
• No in-line images Yet
• Private Messages are not currently supported, they will be coming soon

Previews

I’m in the process of submitting my Lemmy client (Arctic) to TestFlight, and I had some concerns about NSFW options in my app.

As per section 1.2 User-Generated Content it states that NSFW content needs to be disabled by default, and can only be enabled through the website.

Apps with user-generated content or services that end up being used primarily for pornographic content, Chatroulette-style experiences, objectification of real people (e.g. “hot-or-not” voting), making physical threats, or bullying do not belong on the App Store and may be removed without notice. If your app includes user-generated content from a web-based service, it may display incidental mature “NSFW” content, provided that the content is hidden by default and only displayed when the user turns it on via your website.

Does this mean that I am not aloud to include any options in my apps interface regarding NSFW content, eg: Blur / Hide NSFW Content, Even if the content is hidden by default?

Any pointers here would be useful. I do see that other Lemmy clients are including options within apps and have not had any issues so far, but the policy seems to indicate this is not allowed.