Hi, this update is mostly focused on some performance updates to Image rendering and memory management. I stripped out the old plugin I had doing this and am now handling things a bit more manually. Hopefully this should improve the experience of long scrolling sessions. I did refactor a lot so if you see any bugs here please let me know! Large new additions in this release are URL domain filters, and video zoom. I'm starting work on settings import/export but it's not ready just yet.

Added

• Added URL Domain filters
• Added video zoom (double tap, pinch)
• Added a link icon to posts without thumbnails
• Added None as a comment long press action
• Better handling when proxied comment resolve fails

Fixed

• Fixed voting on posts refreshing the video player
• Fixed some issues with image heights not fitting correctly
• Minor hotfix to change the link icon on posts to be centered and not left aligned
• Improved the list of subscriptions for large lists
• Fixed an issue where images would sometimes not free from memory
• Fixed photo view not expanding
• Fixed a small screen flash on image expand
• improved performance of large images
• All Snackbars now last for 5 seconds
• Fixed markdown not loading in some cases when it should
• URL confirmation prompt now also applies to external links
• Fixed an issue with switching accounts when uing an email to log in
• Fixed an issue with Spoiler tag sometimes not appearing
• shouldInstanceBlockIncludeUsers no longer defaults to on
• Fixed reply swipe gesture
• Improved freeing of memory in some cases for preloaded images
• Fixed comment navigator when showing all comments
• Create comment screen no longer has discard prompt if drafts are enabled

Thank you everyone for all of the support and suggestions, please keep them coming and we'll continue to make Connect the best app for browsing Lemmy!

Links:

• Google play
• you can support me here

-kuroneko

Hi, I've just been responding to feedback and implementing suggestions and release 141 is just that. Large new features are in-app release notes, customization for comment long-press actions, and community filters. Alongside a dozen smaller fixes, additions, and optimizations.

Added

• Added hex input to colour pickers
• Added setting to change comment long press action
• Added option to hide nsfw in main feeds but not inside communities (note currently only applies to 'hide')
• Added sign up button on sign in page
• Added sticky sort (remembers changes to sort)
• Added community filters (filters posts from communities whose name matches a filter)
• Added setting to control notification time Interval (10S to 12H)
• Added share and hide to comment swipe actions
• Added release notes to app startup
• Added setting to control release notes

Fixed

• Fixed table markdown in some scenarios
• Fixed the exit confirmation not showing when the left drawer was disabled
• Fixed issue with jumping to parent comment being offset in comment navigator
• Fixed draft comments loading the wrong comment while editing when you have multiple comments
• Fixed 'View full post' modal not disappearing on click
• Fixed theme setting not persisting
• Some optimizations to how posts are laid out, scrolling should feel smoother
• Small logo tweak

Thank you everyone for all of the support and suggestions, please keep them coming and we'll continue to make Connect the best app for browsing Lemmy!

Links:

• Google play
• you can support me here

-kuroneko

Hi, I wanted to get more into theme and customization improvements but a lot of great feature requests came up and I ended up just implementing those instead. I might need a better system to compile release notes soon as in the past week there have been 11 beta releases and it's a bit tedious to go through each to compile the final release notes. Probably the biggest change in this release is the way back navigation works, hopefully it's now in a state that is more intuitive instead of back activating the drawer menu.

Thank you to everyone that has taken the time to provide feedback and suggestions, even if I haven't had the time to respond I've read them all. It's really appreciated!

Also Connect turns 2 months old on Tuesday. Kind of crazy how quickly that went and how much the app has changed in that short amount of time. Thank you again to everyone that has stuck with me these past 2 months, Connect is as much your app as it is mine.

Changes

• Changed back button behaviour and a swipe gesture to show the menu.
• NSFW blur is now a real blur
• [Post card] Changed the comment icon to go to comments and added an optional 'reply' icon which preserves the older behaviour
• Added Search bar to settings since they are now a lot of settings
• Changing sort order in list views no longer changes your sort order setting
• Long pressing a setting will now copy its name
• Marking posts read on scroll should now be more reliable for long posts
• Added 'Undo Hide post' action when hiding a post
• Added some padding to user avatars
• Added setting to autohide comment replies
• Increased the hitbox for the comment button to include the number
• Added undo for the 'Hide Above' action
• Removed a small fade in for images so they now load immediately
• Added 'Subscribe' to the post action menu
• Added setting for sticky bottom bars or hiding on scroll
• Fixed an issue with the 'Saved' page now combining posts and comments correctly
• Added experimental option to remember scroll position in comment lists
• Added setting to hide markdown images
• Added "copy article url" to post action menu
• Added volume controls to video and saving so changes persist to future videos
• Added icon to flag bot accounts (robot)
• Improved 'Experimental post swipe navigation' to include a swipe to previous and if swipe gestures are turned off the entire page is a swipe target
• High refresh rate defaults to on
• Improved the 'Block' page, list of communities to block now shows all results instead of 1 page of results
• Fixed issue within the inbox where comments could sometimes be duplicated
• Fixed table markdown when combined with images
• Fixed an issue with .website instance names not loading correctly

More theme customization is coming!

Links:

• Google play
• you can support me here

-kuroneko

Hi, past couple days have seen a influx of new users so welcome everybody! This release is aimed at improving customization options and some requested improvements. The secondary buttons on post cards can now be customized, added a 'Hide above' option which will hide all posts above the selected post, and the upvote colour can now be customized (also applies to the new comment counter and swipe action background on upvote tiles).

Changes

• Upvote colour can now be customized
• Fixed a bug with the subscribe button not being in the correct state within About Community
• & symbol now renders correctly on posts and comments
• global setting moved up within the Settings page to make it more obvious
• filter terms now accept regex (should start and end with a "/" eg /foo/)
• spoiler tags should now work for multi-line spoilers
• Added a toggle to display comment debug information (shows id, children count, hot rank, upvotes, downvotes - probably only useful for debugging).
• Fixed an issue where 'View More' is showing when it shouldn't be

What would you like to see next: Tablet UI or more granular theme customizations?

Links:

• Google play
• you can support me here

&

-kuroneko

Hi, firstly thank you to all the beta testers that have helped find bugs and issues. I hope this release is even more stable as a result. It's been a couple days since the last release so I was able to get a lot done in this one. Big changes include a bottom navigation drawer, comment navigation, and improvements to the settings page.

What's new

• Optional bottom navigation drawer
• Comment 'next' 'prev navigation bar
• Left hand/ right hand mode which squishes comment actions to the left or right.
• Setting to mark post as read when viewing image
• Added setting for changing the theme text colour
• Community label is displayed in the profile list of posts
• Ability to mark posts as read when viewing images
• Ability to fix the top bar
• Added sort option for Top '1 hour'
• Clicking links now first confirms with the user

Fixes

• Memory optimizations to make scrolling smoother
• After adding reply, no longer switch to single thread view
• Fixed issue with reply button
• Display message when all posts in a list are being filtered
• Fixed issue with editing replies with special characters
• Improved comment navigator to scroll to a more centered position
• Added a post image to the settings post edit page
• Fixed issue with preload option not saving
• Bell notification icon should update a bit more smartly

Links:

• Google play
• you can support me here

-kuroneko

Hi, I'm working on the next release and there's a lot of changes so rather than just release it straight away I'd like your help! Hopefully this way those that don't want the newest features can enjoy a more stable experience and those that want to play with new features can do so as well.

Here is the link to join:

• Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kuroneko.lemmy_connect
• Join on the web: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.kuroneko.lemmy_connect

edit: I won't post the release notes until it fully releases in a couple days or so so as to not spoil anything :)

Beta 1.0.85 Changelog:

• Fixed issue with reply button
• Display message when all posts in a list are being filtered

Beta 1.0.84 Changelog:

• Fixed issue with editing replies with special characters
• Improved comment navigator to scroll to a more centered position
• Added a post image to the settings post edit page
• Fixed issue with preload option not saving
• Bell notification icon should update a bit more smartly

Hi, only bug fixes in this release as the feature I'm working on isn't quite ready yet and I had to set up a local instance of Lemmy for testing purposes without spamming a live instance. Hopefully this means more testing from my side going forward and more app stability. For thumbnails I'm now loading in better compressed images so you should see memory and network improvements, especially on list views where I also scale the thumbnail to the size of the list card, 1MB images are now 10KB in my testing. I changed the upvote colour to more of an orangey colour. It matches the app icon orange now. If you have the setting to open links in a external browser it no longer applies to opening images.

What's new

• Upvote colour is now orange
• Thumbnails are now more efficient (especially list views)
• Images no longer open in external browser
• Communities will now respect the 'Should Launch Externally' setting on open

Fixes

• Comment hint text ('Comment') now matches your theme settings
• Comment textbox is now autofocused so no extra click needed
• Improved the text visibility of the Notificiation icon number
• List view images are now aligned to the top and not the center
• Fixed a minor left padding issue on List view body text
• Adjusted the text for 'Show Post Bottom bar' to better reflect what it does
• Fixed a bug with Subscribe/Unsubscribe not showing correct values in the top right action menu
• Fixed the error message when unable to find a person
• Fixed copy url action item for web views

Thank you so much for all of your feedback! A bottom nav drawer seems like the most requested feature currently so please look forward to that! It will have an option to disable for those that don't prefer it.

Links:

• Google play
• you can support me here

-kuroneko

Hi, mostly small improvements in this release. I spent a bunch of time on a horizontal swipe to go to the next post but it still needs some work. Anyways if you want to check it out it's under an Experimental tag at the bottom of settings. If you use List view I hope you like this release as I made some improvements to the List view layouts.

What's new

• General font size adjustments
• Comment replies are now selectable when replying
• Added Reset buttons to all colour pickers
• Blocked instance comments now have an optional message to show them
• Improved the 'Show more comments' button in some scenarios. Should show on Profile views now too if there are responses.
• Moved the instance name down from the title as it was getting cut off in same cases
• Added user tag options to comments and posts action menus
• Experimental feature horizontal swipe for next post
• Improved the UX of the list views
• Added 'Copy URL' to image views

Fixes

• Fixed theme surface and background not resetting
• Fixed an issue where saving settings would override theme customizations in some scenarios
• added option to block instances via post options menu
• Now only one comment can be active at a time, clicking another comment will deselect the previous one
• Changed user tags to use the tertiary comment, should be more obvious now
• Clicking the + button to create a post in a community should now autofill that community.
• Fixed a bug where the reply button wouldn't work if swipe navigation was turned off.

Question: would you prefer to see a bottom navigation drawer or top level comment navigation (^ prev v next) in the next release?

Links:

• Google play
• you can support me here

-kuroneko

Hi, Thanks for all the tremendous feedback yesterday. I tried to take that into account and add some of the more requested features. Things to look forward to in this release would be: Improved search options (with tabs for posts, comments, communities, user), user notes section which lets you add global tags to users that only you can see, and report options to comments and posts. I tried to address some of the bugs reported too, and hopefully settings should be working as expected through the upgrade.

What's new

• Added indicator of how many unread messages you have in your inbox
• Added 'Open' option to the about instance page
• Searching for a community with a !community or !community@instance format will now take you there directly
• Added total user counts to the about instance page Added new search page
• The info bar on posts now displays above the image when 'Title about image' setting is active.
• Added user notes (option on the user pages in the top right)

Fixes

• Replying to a comment should now more reliably show that comment
• Card views and lists now use even less memory
• Fixed a left side padding issue in list views when there is no thumbnail
• Fixed user profile 'Joined at' dates to be more accurate
• Better handling of different aspect ratios for the user avatar in the drawer header
• Adjusted some divider spacing on the post details page (reduced some unnecessary white space)
• Hide read posts no longer applies to the 'Saved' page
• Toast colour now matches theme

I'm continuing to monitor a subscription issue where some of them don't show up, I added some retries if the API call fails and more error handling.

Links:

• Google play
• you can support me here

-kuroneko