Hi, Connect 1.0.63 is our two week birthday (from this post). Hard to imagine it's only been two weeks. This version brings a lot of new things but the big features would be instance level blocking, 'show more comments' buttons to make comment views more compact, new theme options, and the ability to mark a post as read while scrolling.
What's new
Added community icons next to names in the main feeds
Added an option to show @instance labels on all usernames and communities
Added instance level blocking
Added dividers between cards
Create post community suggestions are improved, will now autofill with your subscriptions and suggest a community you've subscribed to first
Added show more comments buttons
Added option to mark posts as read on scroll
Added more theme options
Fixes
Fixed an issue with the profile tab not refreshing in some scenarios
Changed community icons to be smaller and they should load faster
Added some new sort options for posts
Fixed notification icon hopefully (no more blank square)
Fixed swipe to reply not working from the inbox
Viewing a comment from your inbox will now remove the comment when you go back
Improved the tap target when interacting with a short comment
Fixed an issue with uploading an image in comment view
comment title text now wraps instead of getting cut off
Improved memory usage when scrolling through a lot of images (still some more improvements coming on this one, we're not freeing up images in memory as often as we could be)
Fixed an issue with NSFW communities not being searchable (and subsequently some link handling being broken if the community is marked nsfw)
Fixed an issue with the search back button
Fixed an issue with incorrect passwords if the length is more than 60 (it's now capped to 60 which is what Lemmy does).
In case you're wondering what was in versions .60-.62, they were all minor hotfixes that have been combined into this list. Also for those wondering when it's going to be open sourced it's coming, I hear you! my focus right now is on adding features and improvements.
Hello, I noticed you added an option to leave post title above media posts. I'm very thankful for that. I have a suggestion on changing its current looks though.
I think it would look much better if you also moved these specific details above the media but below the post title similar to how text posts look.
2 weeks?? I downloaded the app 2 days ago and assumed it had been around much longer with how well its built and organized. Yall are doing great work, thank you!
Instance level blocking??? This is awesome, really, thank you so much.
Did you also add a karma count when looking at people's profiles? Or was this there before and I just didnt notice?
Seriously the amount of work you are pouring into the app is impressive, and it is pretty much unrivaled at the moment.
PS: May I suggest a feature? Profile notes, where you can add a note to profiles so you can remember some people you interact with. In case it isnt clear what I mean, both Mastodon and Kbin have this feature, you go to a profile and it says "add note", there you can write something about the user that only you can see and it helps keep track of people here.
Wanted to point out a few more things I've noticed
I've noticed that some settings don't persist after Connect is updated. I'm not sure if that's because the settings pane changes with new options hence it can't be persisted but just something I noticed
It would be nice to have a drafts section for comments and posts such that you can temporarily save it and come back to editing it and finishing it up.
It would be awesome to see a preview of either the post or comment that you are replying to with the username there as we so you have reference as to what you are replying to.
When you tap to bring up the menu to interact with comments, maybe a setting to squish the icons to either the right or left would be nice to have for those who are browsing with one hand
It would also be nice to have an indicator of how many Unread messages you have in your inbox beside the word Inbox in the menu and possibly even on the hamburger menu itself to alert you to look into the menu
In the About Instance page, I've noticed that the total subscribers count doesn't show, but it does in the About Community page.
When you tap on the About Instance menu, it takes you to a new window context as expected to show you the necessary details and when you navigate back, it takes you back to where you were as expected. However, in the About Community page, it seems to be more of an overlay in the same context such that if you do navigate back, it takes you completely out of the post that you were viewing when you had clicked About Community.
In the About Instance and About Community pages, would be nice to have an Open context menu to open it up externally on a web browser as well. I think it's only there in About Community at the moment.
Would you be able to allow to search for Communities that may not exist in the Instance search using the full address (!lemmyconnect@lemmy.ca) like we can on the Lemmy web app
I’ve noticed that some settings don’t persist after Connect is updated. I’m not sure if that’s because the settings pane changes with new options hence it can’t be persisted but just something I noticed
This happened with the last update as well. It took me a bit of time to figure out why some things seemed a little off. At least with this update I realized immediately why things weren't right. Despite seeming kind of small, I think this is a somewhat serious issue, since it feels like the update did a lot to change the interface, even though it didn't.
That being said, Connect is awesome and this certainly isn't a deal breaker for it.
I'm experiencing a possibly related issue- I can only see local communities in my subscription list. Curiously, my frontpage seems to be functional with subscriptions to federated communities coming through like normal.
When I post a comment, the view should be on the comment I posted, not reverted back to the top of the page. Full post view should be default here, not require an extra click.
Can we get more font size options? Small is too small and medium is too big.
Block community doesn't always work? I've blocked c/formula1 at least 7 times now. I don't think it was 7 unique communities.
Maybe more theme options? Something in between dark and AMOLED
If I do a search, the back button on the top left of the search results page is seemingly broken (I see it says this is fixed; I don't think it is?).
Blocking instances isn't working for me at all. An instance is showing in the list and I made sure it was spelled correctly but posts still show up when I'm browsing All, etc.
I'd really really like to seethe domain of external links under the post title. Don't need a summary or anything, just a general idea of where I'm heading.
How can I donate money to you? This is absolutely incredible work.
Theme changes don't save, past the current session, reverting back to default, when the app is restarted, or when making changes to general settings....🤷🏻♂️
Still experiencing this with 1.0.65. Colours revert on app restart, and in subsequent opens of the theme settings they seem to pick up the the colour of other elements.
Still having the issue on some of my accounts (not all of them) that some subs will show as being not subscribed to even tho I am, and wont let me add them to favorites. I thought it was a tablet specific issue but I can reproduce it as well on my phone.
Is there anything in common between the subs that aren't showing up? I know sometimes subscribing goes into a 'Pending' state which the app currently doesn't do a good job of conveying. It shows up correctly on the website?
complete wipe / uninstall (data / cache) of Connect
tried to unsub from the web and resub through Connect
tried to unsub from connect and resub trhough the web
always the same results. Its pretty hard to know which specific communities are overall affected, but I can tell you that it's not a "pending" issue and it doesnt seem to be related to specific community instances or account instance. (I can reproduce this throught my sh.j.w account and .world account, and have seens issues with .ca / .world communities)
fwiw a complete wipe seems to have made it worse. before I could see the Connect community appear in my subs on one of my accounts, now its gone on both. Let me know if you want me to try something else!
This is a really tiny thing but can the card dividers be removable? I personally think having the cards themselves is enough separation and the dividers end up as visual clutter.
I'm sure there are people who want them, so could those be made into an option or something?
Not sure if this is the right place.
First of all I'm super happy I can hide posts now also hiding by scrolling past is really nice. However it seems that hidden posts don't even show up in saved posts. Shouldn't the saved status habe priority over hidden? I don't like to see anything twice unless I save it for later but it seems this is impossible right now?
Ah I think it's related to the image dimensions and trying to force it into a 1:1 aspect ratio circle. I'll fix that in the next release. Ability to add/edit avatars would be a nice feature.
I noticed posts that don't have a picture have their title, and post detail line directly that, spaced to the right and not left aligned. I'm guessing the space is due to picture padding or something. The OCD people like me would appreciate it if it was aligned. 😆 Sorry to nitpick.
Small request though: Toggleable setting that adds a hide/show button to each comment so that we can immediately hide a post instead of waiting for the long press to trigger. I know screen real estate is at a premium for most phones, which is why this would be a Toggleable setting.
Thanks for being so responsive! I tried out that setting just now and it's not quite what I mean in terms of UX. To preface: I'm not trying to make your app a clone of RIF which I heavily used, and your app does feel the most similar to that for me so do what you will with my feedback.
My main issue with the way Connect currently behaves is if I wanted to collapse the first few comments after returning to a post, I'd have to either toggle the setting to tap each comment to hide them all, before toggling it again so that I can interact with the comments normally, such as voting, bookmarking, sharing, etc.
Whereas, if the options were available all at once when tapping on a comment, I can do everything in two taps, versus one or the other, with two taps, or waiting for a long tap to process.
As stated previously, I know screen real estate is at a premium for some devices, so cramming more buttons below each comment is not necessarily ideal. But what RIF did well, was including these features all at once to the user when the comment was tapped, by displaying extra action buttons above the selected post, in addition to the normal interaction buttons below the post. See the screenshot attached below:
Edit: To add to this, after rereading that post, I'd like to make the distinction that I mean collapse a comment, everywhere I say the word hide. As there are many times I'd like to reread comments if new replies are posted below them, and I've yet to figure out how to unhide comments after testing the hide feature out.
Edit 2: Also just noticed a bug. Viewing the community info displays Subscribe for all instances, regardless of actual subscription state.
Every update my settings reset, even the default view thingy in the left menu
Posts seem to always show a rating one higher than the actual rating
Sorry for not having better complaints, I'm slowly running out of them
Also could you make images "swipe-away-able", or make the tap away more reliable and significantly faster? Every time I want to go through a gallery and rapidly open and close the images one after tge other I feel like I spend twice as much time waiting for them to close than on actually looking at them
Edit: Seems the rating is also instance dependent, I just tested on one where it's reliably +1 for all posts. Also found a new annoyance: tall image scrolling lacks momentum (tap a tall image, double tap it to zoom in, scroll up and down. You'll notice the scroll stops as soon as you release your slide gesture, unlike all other scrollable elements which continue with some momentum, slowly coming to a stop much further down. This leads to scrolling through images feeling extremely sluggish)
Great update guys really love the progress you guys are making. It's honestly incredible how fast you all are working.
That being said, I have one issue:
You save images downloaded to downloads/connect
Idk if it's just my phone or if it's android in general, but for some reason this nested folder in downloads isn't seen by apps when I go to post a photo.
I was on the wrong update, lol.
Can we get that changed to pictures/connect, or maybe have an option to choose where things are saved?
It'd be really nice if we could set the location. Even better if we could set it for each download, e.g. so we could sort & categorize at download time.
Oh dang, I'm a dumdum, I was on the previous update, I must not have checked the settings since the last update there were so many new ones I thought I was on the latest version, sorry for the confusion
Okay, fucling love connect, thanks for adding themes color selection!!!
All I need is being able to chance theAMOLED color to a color picked like in the picture to get the aesthetic I wanted!
Thx for all the updates they're amazing!
EDIT: I just realized that If I use dark or light mode I can change the background color too ahahaha. Oh man I love this app
Holy moly, that's a lot for one day's work. My preferences got wiped again, but that's probably to be expected with the total rework of the settings screen.
The only issue I'm noticing now is that -- with particularly dense comment threads -- tapping on my comment from my Profile will often load the corresponding post with no comments visible. Usually this is accompanied by an error at the bottom of the screen saying the comment could not be found (occasionally the error does not appear).
Maybe it's just a "lemmy.world is overloaded" issue, but .world has actually seemed pretty stable since yesterday.