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"
That’s great, glad you like it. As for sharing media, you can easily share any image or video directly from the media viewer. Or If you have a sharing workflow that’s not supported, I can see about adding options, or adjusting the current options.
Some images when I share them are the URLs etc and videos.
I know Apollo is an influence, but I remember being able to long press on media and hit share and it would download the media to cache and send that directly.
Ahh, yes you are correct. This was an oversight on my part. I just added support for downloading videos and gifs for saving, but I forgot to integrate this with the share sheet. I’ll fix that in the next update so you don’t have to save the media before sharing.