Avelon App

Looks like full radio silence, and even the IAP links in the app have started to die. Looks like evgiz has moved on to other projects as well based on their twitter. I'll be over on Voyager.

So when I try gif scrubbing, it says I need to upgrade to Pro. Okay, but in settings there are only options for donating to the developer now, and there is no Pro upgrade anymore. So what’s going on here? Is the Pro option going away? If I donate, will I get Pro features? Does the interface just need to catch up with new monetization model? I’m confused.

This happens both on a feed as well as within a thread.

Happens both on my direct instance as well as on a random instance out there.

I go to scroll, and there is a nearly one-second pause before the screen jumps to where I have scrolled. If I start very slowly, there is no pause, but I am talking about an unreasonably slow start to the scroll.

Working with an iPhone 15 Pro Max, hardware limitations should not be in play here.

Working with the latest version of Avalon.

Curious if I am the only one.

Have you given up on this project?

I think Avelon has become one of the best Lemmy apps for iOS, but there is one issue that is preventing me from buying into Pro and making it my default: inline video only for video and gifs.

This is such a huge drawback to otherwise great app; the native player has simple, intuitive and familiar controls; allowing users to switch to horizontal, mute, pause, rewind/forward, etc.

Is support for the native player disabled intentionally or is this something that is in the works?

It’s been a months since 1.0.7 and the app still has bugs that need to be fixed. I’m hesitant to pay for the next month of pro without any progress. Meanwhile Voyager gets multiple updates per week…

A while back I had done this study for upvote/downvote colors in each apps. Avelon seems to be in the right spot, but an option to customize the colors would be nice maybe…

Hey everyone! For more than a month now I've been working hard on the biggest update to Avelon so far. Today I'm really excited to announce that it's finally out on the App Store! The update includes a whole bunch of cool new features for people who want that little extra and QOL improvements all-around.

Some of the highlights of this update include:

• Community groups
• App themes
• Right-edge swipe-to-go-forward gesture
• Custom app icons
• GIF/video scrubbing
• Advanced filtering tools, including keywords & instances
• Fixes to a bunch of iOS 17 related issues
• New markdown editor tools
• Smart comment jump button
• Ability to manage and clear app cache
• Support for Lemmy 0.19RC
• Lots of bug fixes & improvements all around

I really appreciate everyone who has helped with beta testing during the 1.0.6 cycle, you guys are honestly great!! It's super motivating to hear so many people enjoying the app, and as always I'm open to suggestions and feedback. I hope you find the Pro-model I've landed on a fair/decent way to run the app. I've tried my best to consider all factors like affordability, development, as well as the quality & quantity of what Pro offers - and I hope I've found a good middle ground.

As for the future: for 1.0.7 I'm thinking I'm gonna focus primarily on performance, stability & bug fixes, but I'll probably throw in some more QOL features as well. Just let me know if you're missing anything or if you find any pesky bugs or nuisances. Hope you enjoy the update!

~~Edit: Seems to be a slight issue with upgrading to pro, working on it 😅~~

Edit: Fixed!

Hey friends, I see you just pushed another test flight build, cheers for all the new updates. However, I just tried changing the App Icon and it doesn’t work at all, just stays on the default one. I tried a bunch to see if it was just one of them glitching out, but none of them work.

The first reply to a comment is always indented one unit too far to the right because that comment gets both the indentation and the line to the left of it. It makes the comment view look kinda messy and wrong.

The first reply to a comment should probably only have the line next to it and not be indented futher to look correct.

You can take a look at how voyager is handling it.

I just posted this link to a PeerTube video, but the video playback failed. Is PeerTube generally not supported?
Any suggestions which video hoster I should use for Lemmy and Avelon?

A lot of other Lemmy apps have this sort. Can you consider adding this? Thanks 🙏!

The official Lemmy Web-UI has a feature to cross-post posts to other communities. I think this feature is important especially for small communities, with niche topics.
An critic that I often read about Lemmy is that new Lemmy users miss their small communities.
So, adding the cross-post feature could bring an healthy growth to this communities.

I was so excited to try this but it’s just showing a dark screen when you swipe forward. Everything else working beautifully though as far as I can tell.

https://imgur.com/a/csu5w6o

Hi, question in title – i just dont know how to do it, hints are welcome. Thx 🌸

This may be an odd request but as it stands now there are at least two ways to upvote/downvote a post, either clicking the arrow buttons on the left side of the post or the big rounded buttons on the right side too.

I think for a very minimal, clean and simple look if you could add an option to remove/hide the big rounded upvote buttons. I normally tap the little small arrow on the left so the big rounded buttons take up space.

Please let me know if this is already being worked on or if it’s something you might consider to add in the future I’d greatly appreciate it.

I have a light sensitivity problem with my eyes, so I find screens easiest to view when matching dark/light mode with my surroundings (night or day respectively).

This works fine in theory, but with some apps the dark mode is very black. This makes the white text uncomfortable to read and can lead to an afterimage when reading in a low-light (but not extremely dark) environment.

Alternative dark/light themes, such as OKSolar (https://meat.io/oksolar) can help with this a lot. Or even just a toggle that enables a slightly less black dark mode.

Hopefully there’s some plans to implement something like this, as I know it can impact a decent amount of people.

Hi everyone!

It's been quite the journey, but Avelon is finally on the App Store!

Click here to download!

The app is includes a lot of awesome features requested by the community, including:

• Sleek design that fits right in on iOS & iPadOS
• Highly customizable look & behavior
• Mark read on scroll & hide read posts
• Customizable swipe gestures
• Multiple account support
• Smart link previews in posts and comments
• Support for videos, gifs, photos & other media
• Custom font support
• Write replies with markdown highlighting
• Privacy focused - the app has no tracking of any kind
• Gallery mode + hide bars on scroll = full immersion ... and a lot more!

Screenshots

Here's some cool app store screenshots of the app:

Developing this app has been one of the best development experiences I've had, and I feel very privileged and happy to have been able to contribute to Lemmy in this way. Nothing is more motivating than seeing so many people already enjoying the app and providing suggestions and feedback.

I really hope you enjoy Avelon, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about what everyone thinks. Keep the feedback coming!

Thank you, Sigve Rokenes

First off, thanks for building this great app! I'm enjoying it a lot so far.

I have some feedback about the top nav menu which shows after tapping the word there, e.g. 'All', 'Home', etc.

• Subscriptions list: I'd love to be able to toggle the subscriptions list on/off, as I'm often using this menu to quickly toggle between All/Home/Local. For me it would be more helpful if these were recently visited communities. Note: I didn't realize this was a subscriptions list at first, or that it was scrollable
• Time to open: Currently it takes ~2 seconds to see the menu after tapping it. I'm hoping future releases will speed up the time it takes to open this menu!
• Navigation: After tapping one of the 3 top options, e.g. 'All' from 'Home', it opens as a view nested within the previous view, rather than toggling to the new view (requiring two taps to get back to Subscriptions)
• Keyboard bug: Keyboard stays open after tapping an option

My iPhone is always in silent mode, but this also prevents Avelon from playing videos with sound. I guess playing sound should be independent of the ringtone silent mode.

But I really like it that there even is the possibility to watch videos in the app, I guess that's the first app supporting it.

Heyo everyone,

This update brings a few cool new features, most notably:

• Smart link previews
  • Now shown in comments and posts
  • Previews for communities, users and regular links
• Image carousels
  • For posts with lots of images!
• iPad support
• Layout/ui tweaks
• Bug fixes and other improvements

Check out this image gallery in the latest build to see how it works:

(just scroll through it!)

I figured (like some other devs) that some iPad support is better than none. Though the layout is not built from the ground up for iPad, it now fills the whole screen and pushes in some content. This is similar to how other apps like Apollo did it, and it looks much nicer than than a scaled up phone app. I haven't had time to test this version much, so please let me know if you discover any weird stuff.

The update also introduces a custom markdown rendering system that enables me to add things like link previews and image carousels. Seems to work pretty well now, but could definitely be some bugs with it for certain posts - if you find any, let me know!

Hope you enjoy the update!

Hi guys! This update (version 1.0.2 build 12) brings more sweet features, including:

• Custom font support
  • Text size fully customizable!
• Hide read posts
  • Customizable per-feed or you can manually toggle it
• Mark posts read on scroll
• More swipe gestures:
  • Collapse comment thread
  • Mark post as read
• Unfinished replies are now saved as drafts
• Option to delete your embarassing comments
• Body preview for text posts
• More customization options:
  • Community icons & user avatars
  • Large vote buttons
  • Account avatar in bottom tab
  • Hide tab labels (super clean!)
  • Number of lines to show for text posts
• Download/share buttons in the image viewer
• Ellipsis buttons for posts & comments
  • Easily access common options
• Reworked thread rendering system
• Edited comments now has an edited icon
• Profile pages now have avatar images
• Aaaand of course a bunch of various UI improvements & bug fixes

Wanna check it out? Here's the link:

Download on Testflight

For you seasoned testers out there, I'd really like some feedback on any bugs you might find, especially for the mark-read-on-scroll and hide-read-posts feature, but of course everything else as well. Some of these systems were a bit tricky to get right, so I might have introduced a few new bugs here and there.

Hope you enjoy the update, and let me know what you think!

Am I missing something or is it not yet possible to post from Avelon?

Hi everyone! I'm happy to announce that my iOS Lemmy app "Avelon" is finally ready for beta testing! I've been working tirelessly on the app lately and I think it is turning into a quite solid experience now. I'm very excited to hear what you think and gather more feedback before I move towards an App Store release.

My focus for Avelon has been to polish the base functionality as much as possible to ensure that the day-to-day browsing feels as good as possible. I've also done things a bit differently to make it easier for new people to try out the Fediverse. Rather than requiring new users to look through a complicated list of instances the first time, the app automatically shuffles a list of preset instances so you don't need to think about it until later when you register. This will hopefully also reduce the load on individual servers.

Features

Avelon already supports quite a few cool features:

• Posts and feeds
  • Clean UI to explore all your feeds
  • A pretty nice comment view
  • Support for images, GIFs, videos, youtube
  • See community feeds and sidebars
  • Quick search communities and subscriptions
• Login to your account
  • Reply to posts/comments (with markdown highlighter!)
  • View and edit your old comments
  • Upvote comments and posts
  • View/manage your followed communities
• Design & customization
  • Dark and light mode with customizable accent color
  • Compact posts, large posts and gallery view
  • Footer/header bars automatically hide for a cleaner experience
  • Change behavior such as tap to collapse, default sorting etc.
  • Long press actions for a less cluttered interface

..and probably some other things I can't remember just now.

Screenshots

Check these out!

Join the beta

The beta is available on testflight through this link (limited to 1000 testers for now):

Join Avelon Beta on Testflight

The app is supported on all iPhones with iOS 16 and higher (worked ok on my old iPhone X!). I'd love to hear what you think about the overall user experience, design, functionality, stability as well as any bugs or issues you might find. A few important features are still missing, most notably adding new posts. I'd love to hear what additions you are most interested in me looking at first:

• Creating posts
• Viewing users comments/posts
• Saving posts/comments
• Report/mod tools
• Multiple accounts
• Themes/more customization
• Improved image/video viewer
• Anything else?

Thank you & future plans

First, I'd like to thank Christian Selig (the developer of the Apollo app) for creating a really amazing app that I've been using every day for the last several years. As you can tell, Avelon is definitely inspired by Apollo (though I think I've put my own personal spin on the design and functionality!).

If people enjoy Avelon I'd like to spend more of my free time working on it and improving the app over time. In the spirit of transparency, I'd like to mention that I might do some kind of "pro" version at some point later on to support the project. All the base functionality people need will of course be free, but pro features could be additional "nice-to-have" features like themes or advanced tools etc. I'm not planning to do anything paid just yet though, just wanted to mention it. Right now my focus is to provide a great experience and to help build the Lemmy platform into something even better.

Finally I'd like to thank the Lemmy developers as well as everyone using the platform. Everyone contributing is making this platform the amazing place it is turning into. I personally haven't browsed the site-that-should-not-be-named since the API shut down - I decided to spend all that time on developing this app instead. And I'm really excited to see what Lemmy becomes over the years.

Sigve Røkenes

/evgiz