Arctic

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: [email protected]

Hopefully if all goes well in review, and review times are not extremely long right now, then I will be releasing Arctic on the AppStore within the next week or so.

Thank you to all the great testers for all your support and feedback!

TestFlight builds are not going anywhere, I will be continuing to push new builds as often as possible, though releases may change a bit. Going forward we will have RC (release candidate) builds which will be targeted at bug and stability testing to ensure updates are not introducing new issues into the AppStore releases. I’ll have more information on this when I release the next TestFlight build.

The upvote/downvote buttons are covered by text on some posts, which makes them untappable.

Any plan to support widgets? Something similar to what Apollo had? Thanks

Sorry for such a delay in posting release notes, I’ve been very busy the last few weeks, and almost all of my free time has been spent working on updates. Since my last release post, I’ve released v0.3.0, v0.3.1, v0.3.2.

Arctic gained quite a few new features in these releases. I’ll list off some of the most notable changes, and as alway you can find the full list of changes below.

v0.3.0 was primarily focused on markdown rendering improvements. I added support for Lemmy spoilers, subscript, superscript, highlights, and syntax highlighting. Code and blocks are now rendered with a styled background for better distinction.

v0.3.1 added an all new private messages view. Messages are now sorted into conversations, and displayed in a iMesages style feed. You can now edit, delete, and report private messages. This release also included forward navigation. If you swipe back in the navigation stack, you can swipe back forward and pickup where you left off. There is also a new action to quickly switch the post layout while viewing a feed.

v0.3.2 added options to hide read posts, and mark posts as read while scrolling. There a new post layout Headline which is a compact style that only displays the post title. I also improved the layout of other compact layouts. Reddit gallery links will now be rendered as regular image gallery posts.

I’ve also spent some time preparing the first AppStore release for Arctic. I just about have everything ready for submission, with only iPad previews left to design. I hope to submit the first release to the AppStore by the end of the month.

One last thing I would like to include in the first official release, is a new default icon for Arctic. I’ve tried my hand at a few icons now, and so far I’ve not found any that feel adequate. If anyone here is a graphic designer or digital artist, feel free to reach out to me.

v0.3.0 Changelog

• Added support for new Markdown features to the Markdown Editor
• Added a loading indicator for Lemmy Explorer
• Added option to set the instance used for Guest Mode
• Added font size preview when using the font size slider
• Added appearance settings for adjusting the style of the top and bottom bars in Lemmy
• Added a warning message that will show at the end of feeds if you're viewing a filtered feed eg: listing mode set to Local
• Added a new preview controller when composing a post or comment
• Updated Swimmy to use a single instance of Lemmy Api for all API calls
• Updated the account switcher to use the applied font settings
• Updated to save and restore listing mode when switching to/from guest mode
• Updated Markdown rendering:
  • Added support for syntax highlighting in code blocks
  • Code blocks and inline code will now be rendered in a box
  • Block quotes will now be rendered in a quote box
  • Added support for ~subscript~ and ^superscript^
  • Added support for ==highlight==
  • Added support for Lemmy spoilers
  • Added settings to adjust syntax highlighting behavior
  • Added support for loading remote images inline
    • Note: This behavior is not enabled yet, I still have more work to do to support videos and animated images
• Fixed issue where non-account cells could be reordered in account settings
• Fixed Safari Open In extension causing a crash due to a previous update
• Fixed Lemmy Explorer failing to load Communities
• Fixed issue where the tab-bar profile title would not update for Guest Mode
• Fixed an issue that could cause font size changes to not apply unless using the iPad layout
• Fixed color themes not applying to the top and bottom bars immediately
• Fixed issue where the listing mode could unnecessarily change when switching to guest mode
• Fixed issue where changing the sorting/listing mode when viewing a post would not reload the feed if the feed was empty before changing

v0.3.1 Changelog

• Added a new Private Messages controller similar to iMessage:
  • Messages are now displayed in conversations based on the recipient
  • You can now edit, delete, and report messages
• Added forward navigation, swipe from the right edge of the screen to re-open previously open views
• Added support for selecting text in the reply view context preview
• Added an option to the Posts Feed action menu to quickly change the cell layout style
• Added option to lock Arctic using biometrics (Face ID, Touch ID, Passcode), with an optional timeout before locking
• Added a timestamp to inbox comment cells
• Added additional support for internal Markdown customization (user settings coming soon)
• Fixed issue with the Syntax Highlighting settings page, where the preview would render incorrectly on iOS 16+
• Fixed issue where editing a post multiple times would not reflect the previous changes when re-opening the editor
• Updated font size and color in generated initial icons
• Updated the markdown editor to respond to font size changes

v0.3.2 Changelog

• Added option to mark posts as read while scrolling
• Added option to hide read posts in the home feed
• Added option to hide read posts in community feeds
• Added new post layout style Headline: a compact style that only shows the post title
• Added support for fetching images from Reddit gallery links
• Added support for viewing YouTube and Piped videos from opened posts
• Added support for opening links in private messages
• Added support for markdown [[BADGES]] (color defaults to red for now)
• Added a delivered notifications manager for deleting notifications once they are read in-app (not enabled yet)
• Added notification permissions status cell to notification settings, this is intended to assist users when encountering an error while enabling notifications
• Updated unread count polling, polls now allow for threshold waiting to reduce network calls.
• Updated support for inline HTML in markdown, HTML will now render with the correct font
• Updated NSFW blur view layout
• Updated HLS stream support to reduce stalling when playing streams
• Updated post spacing for compact post layouts
• Fixed media seek gestures blocking the navigation swipe gestures
• Fixed forward navigation transition causing a zoom effect for some views
• Fixed issue where canceling a navigation transition would clear the forward navigation stack
• Fixed an issue preventing videos from opening in the media viewer when viewing a post
• Fixed an issue where media gallery views could display duplicate images
• Fixed issue allowing a link preview to be displayed in a media post
• Fixed a crash that could occur when opening the media viewer in rare cases
• Fixed a crash that could occur when attempting to open a URL that not http(s)
• Fixed issue where animated images could display out of bounds when viewed in a paged media viewer
• Fixed spoilers incorrectly indenting paragraphs after the first line
• Fixed issue where selecting the active account in the account switcher would reload feeds
• Updated support for parsing lemmy semantic versions

Links

• Website: getarctic.app
• TestFlight: testflight.apple.com

Something that I got used to in the past when I used to read fark.com a ton was the ability to have brief tags associated with users that were non-public, Something on the scale of like 25 to 50 characters. I’m not even thinking, necessarily in line with their comments, but a brief note section that could be shown on their profile page when they’re clicked on with maybe some sort of icon next to their name to show that you’ve saved a comment for them.

Fark.com used to have a feature like this where you could use Freeform text to make a short tag about somebody that way in case you ran across them in the future, it could remind you of things. I often used it to denote people who tended to argue in bad faith, or who worked for a specific company or in a specific field or even was a dev on a specific app so they probably knew what they were talking about in those spaces or maybe they lived near me so we’re familiar with regional things, etc.

And while it would probably be better to have it be a Lemmy feature that synchronized across all apps, it could be useful as an app differentiator as well.

Thanks for your consideration.

First of all, just wanted to say thank you. I’ve come over from a different app that I paid for and then it has been, mostly, abandoned. I appreciate the feature set and thought put into Arctic and have donated a bit through the BuyMeACoffee link.

One suggestion/wish: Can you please change the “< Subscriptions” button to something like a hamburger menu icon instead? Here’s my thought process: The current button points backwards which, generally, acts as a navigation to the previous screen one was on. However, in this case, starting on the chosen default tab, there’s nothing really to go back to, yet. Turning this into a menu button gives a better indication of its function and looks more aesthetically pleasing (IMO)

Either way, thanks for the great app and I look forward to your work in the future

I don’t know when they were added, but I just noticed that spoiler tags are supported.

Thanks for the recent 0.3 update!

This app is awesome and I want to support it, but I can’t use buymeacoffee because I don’t have a credit card.

Also curious when there will be an official AppStore release, since this app is pretty solid.

The only thing missing for me personally that I can think of are really minor customization options (like hiding voting arrows in feed/post view since I use gestures or the ability to collapse posts. Like the stuff we got used to by using Apollo.), but else Arctic rocks and I really love the smoothness and polished design.

Solved I have 2 accounts on different instances with the name JaymesRS. I created my original on Midwest.social because it was the one I liked best at the time, I created a second at literature.cafe later because I identified more with that community, but I wanted there to be some continuity between them. I kept the other around for backup though.

If I only sign in to one of those accounts I have no problem with comments showing up on federated communities, however, if I sign in to both and switch accounts then switch back I no longer see federated comments. I will see the number of comments listed, but when I open the thread it says no comments found. I can still see comments on my local community though.

I can fix this by uninstalling and reinstalling the app and re signing in to only one of the accounts. It seems like removing the accounts itself won’t resolve the bug. I have a third account with a completely different name on a 3rd instance too and that doesn’t seem to trigger the bug.

If I can offer any other answers or help, let me know.

Test Flight Version 0.2.11

Happy holidays everyone!

I released Arctic v0.2.10 on TestFlight yesterday. Additionally I forgot to make a release post for v0.2.9 which released a little over a week ago.

v0.2.10

This release features a new Markdown editor, Anonymous Logging, support for new sorting modes, and addresses issues with expired jwt’s on the notification server.

I finally took the time in this release to implement logging using swift-log for cross-platform logging which is shared between Arctic, Swimmy, and the notification server. If you encounter any crashes, please include your logs by going to Settings>About>Arctic Logs. All logs are stored only on device, and don’t include any personal or sensitive information.

The account switcher also includes some new features. Each account now shows a badge indicating your unread notifications at a glance. It will also show a warning if you login session has expired. You can now set a default account, whenever you close or relaunch Arctic, the default account will be loaded.

The markdown editor toolbar has been redesigned. It now features a scrollable action list, and will be easier from me to expand on in the future.

v0.2.9

In this update, I improved the workflow for moderators with a new Mod Zone for accessing all your reports, mod-logs, and user applications. I also added a new section to the subscriptions list that shows all your moderated communities for easy access

Arctic finally supports opening links from other instances natively. For instance if you are browsing lemmy.world and open a link to a post on lemm.ee, Arctic will now resolve the link and open it on the instance you are browsing. In some cases this may fail, for instance if the link is to an instance that is blocked, in this case, it will be opened in the browser.

Most of the other changes in this version are minor tweaks to the UI and a couple of crash/bug fixes. You can read about all the changes in this version below.

Upcoming Changes

I’ve started working on a new markdown renderer using TextKit for a future release. This will offer much improved rendering for markdown. Thinks like embedded tables, code highlighting, backgrounds for blocks like block-quotes, and code. Support for tags, and spoilers, and in-line previews for links and images. This is very early in development and will likely not be released in the next several versions.

v0.2.10 Changelog

• Added logging support, you can now find logs for arctic in settings (logs are anonymous and never leave your device)
• Added a new Markdown toolbar to improve Markdown editing
• Added support for Lemmy v0.19 sort modes (Controversial | Scaled)
• Added support for showing taglines in Instance Sidebars
• Added unread badges to the Account Switcher
• Added the account name to the post composer to show what account you are posting from
• Added support for inline HTML in rendered markdown
• Added 3 new app icons
• Added support for selecting a default account that will automatically be used when reopening Arctic
• Added options to disable Account Switcher badges and warnings
• Added support for parsing semantic versions to determine Lemmy instance versions
• Fixed a crash that could occur when attempting to load the duration of a video
• Fixed more navigation bar layout issues on iOS 15
• Fixed a layout issue in the LoginRefreshController
• Fixed issue where arctic would attempt to fetch video thumbnails for unsupported video urls
• Fixed upvote by pressing upvote label in comment cells
• Fixed an issue where notification options could be reset after certain actions
• Updated to use new features in Swimmy and removed some outdated backend code
• Updated adding an image link to the post composer, the image will be loaded and displayed
• Updated the post composer
• Updated block-quote appearance in rendered markdown (quotes are now rendered as muted italic)
• Improved the readability of popover views
• Re-authenticating an account will now update your auth (jwt) on the notification server (if applicable)

v0.2.9 Changelog

• Added a new Mod Zone for accessing:
  • Mod Logs
  • Reported Content
  • User Applications
• Added swipe action to subscriptions list view for unsubscribing
• Added a moderator section to the subscriptions list view
• Added support for video thumbnails in Grid Gallery views
• Added a reply arrow to the reply composer to better indicate the context being replied to
• Added support for tappable links in profile bios
• Added support for accessing the community selector from inside post views
• Added chevron to the navigation title view to indicate it's tap action
• Added support for resolving urls from other instances
  • Note: when opening a link to a post or comment that is not local to your instance, arctic will fetch the local instance url prior to opening the link. This should resolve most instances of lemmy urls being open in the in-app browser.
• Updated the section header font size in the subscription list view
• Updated the appearance of report, and mod reason controllers
• Updated the subscriptions list view index slider to adjust to theme changes
• Updated action menus community and moderator action menus
• Updated url handling to attempt redirecting http traffic to https
• Updated font size handling to support views presented over the main view
• Updated the indentation width for child comments in comment threads
• Updated about settings section
• Fixed a crash that could occur when using the hue comment color theme
• Fixed an issue where the inbox may fail to load all items in various sections
• Fixed issue where the select text popup would not allow text selection
• Fixed issue where arctic could attempt updating a view after its been dismissed, causing a crash
• Fixed Lemmy Explorer failing to load instances due to API changes

Links

• Website: getarctic.app
• TestFlight: testflight.apple.com

Sometimes I find it helpful to change the post display style per community. E.g. compact for information driven content and large for photo driven communities.

At the moment users need to go into the Settings to change it. Other apps put it into the navigation bar. Have you thought about doing something like this?

Any plans on adding the option to lock the app with FaceID / Passcode?

Arctic v0.2.8 released on TestFlight yesterday. The biggest change in this version is updated support for Lemmy v0.19. I noticed d that several lemmy instances have already updated to v0.19 RC, so I wanted to get this release out as soon as possible.

I also finally added support for overriding the default system font size, and an option to open links in the default browser, or in reader mode.

I finally tracked down a long standing bug that would cause crashes for many users when exiting a post view, or shortly after doing so.

Coming up next in v0.2.9

In the next release I’ve added an all new Mod Zone for quick access to all your mod/admin tools. You can view all your reports, or mod-logs per community. I also added Admin support for managing new user applications.

You can now access your moderated communities in a new section on the subscriptions view, and you can also swipe to unsubscribe from communities.

I’m working on a few more QoL updates before rolling out the next release

v0.2.8 change-log

• Updated support for Lemmy v0.19     - Note: Not all of the new features are supported yet, though all of Arctic's current features should be supported
• Added support for customizing the font size in Arctic
• Added the instance Lemmy version to the sidebar
• Added link options:     - Open in default browser     - Open in reader mode
• Added support for editing Community Watchers
• Added a new App Icon
• Fixed issue where the community selector search did not respect the sorting mode
• Fixed Lemmy Explorer failing to load communities
• Fixed issue where the application badge would not update immediately after changing notification settings
• Fixed an issue with image loading that could cause a crash when exiting a post view
• Updated post composer to pre-select the open community when using the long-press gesture
• Updated in-app Safari to use Arctic's tint color
• Updated Arctic's theme support

Arctic Push Notifications

• Added support for updating community notification
• Added support for notification sounds
• Added support for running on a local machine for debugging
• Added support for sending local-urls in notifications
• Added collapse identifiers to notifications, in the off chance a duplicate notification is sent, it will be collapsed with the previous one
• Fixed incorrect parsing of dates in community notifications
• Fixed an issue that would cause registration application notifications to send repeatedly until they were all approved
• Updated badge notifications to update less frequently, and improve reliability
• Updated support for Lemmy v0.19
• Updated the format of sent notifications to improve client-side parsing support

Links

• Website: getarctic.app
• TestFlight: testflight.apple.com

I have a red circle with a “1” for a notification on the home screen, but I don’t have any unread messages. Any idea what’s causing it or how to correct it?

EDIT: I have 3 accounts added, but I’ve checked all 3, and there’s no unread on any of them.

Arctic v0.2.7 is out

Arctic v0.2.7 is out on TestFlight. This update is focused on backend optimization and push notification features.

Community Notifications

You can now setup notifications for individual communities. Notifications can by filtered by post keywords, post author, and post score. In the coming releases I will add support for more filtering options. To list a few, filter by phrase rather than keyword, upvote/downvote rather than just score, multiple authors, comment count, pinned(stickied) posts, etc. I’ll also be adding support for temporary notifications,community notifications that will automatically expire after a set amount of time.

Account Notification Options

Account notifications can now be toggled by type, you can toggle notifications for: badges, replies, mentions, and messages. This also adds support for mods/admins. You can enable mod notifications for new post/comment reports, and admin notifications for new user registration applications. note that user application cannot currently be viewed within Arctic.

Community Jump

You can now tap the title in any posts feed and quickly jump to a different community using the community selector.

Backend Improvements

Arctics Lemmy API wrapper has now been extracted into a swift package (Swimmy) for improved maintainability and so it can be utilized as a shared code base for Arctics Push Notification server. In doing so, I also added support for Combine allowing for improved error handling with the API.

Arctics Server

I’ve migrated Arctics notification server to a new hosting provider. With the new provider, I may be able to offer all notification options as a free service provided I can sustain off of small donations. This would be ideal, as I never wanted to paywall any features in Arctic. I’ve also setup getarctic.app a new home for Arctic. The website is quite barebones at the moment, but I will be updating it as my time allows.

As always, thank you to everyone for helping test Arctic, and providing feedback. I know new features have slowed in the last few releases. Going forward I’ll be working on polishing the current feature set in hopes of an AppStore release in the next couple of weeks.

v0.2.7 full change-log

• Added Community Notifications
  • Setup notifications for any community
  • Configure filtering options (author, keywords, score, more filters coming soon)
  • Add unlimited watchers
• Added support for granular account notification options
  • Badges (Application notification badge)
  • Replies (Comment and Post replies)
  • Mentions (User mentions)
  • Reports (Moderator reports)
  • Applications (Admin user registration applications) (Arctic does not currently support showing applications in the app)
• Updated the community selector to default to subscribed communities
• Added typing suggestions when searching communities in the community selector
• Added support for displaying thumbnails in push notifications
• Added support for stripping markdown elements in push notifications
• Added community jump to the Posts Feed, tap the title in the navigation bar to quickly jump between communities
• Added Changelog to settings
• Migrated API backend to a package (Swimmy) shared between Arctic and Arctic's push notification server
• Fixed issue on iOS 15 where the Post feed search bar could overlap elements of the navigation bar**

Links

• Website: getarctic.app
• TestFlight: testflight.apple.com

Previews:

I know updates have been comming slow the last few weeks, though I have been hard at work writing a push notification server for Arctic. You can now enable push notifications in settings on a per-account basis. Push notifications currently include Post and Comment replies, as well as Private Messages.

Whats to come: I’m currently working on adding support for more granular notification options. Such as disabling certain types of notifications like Private Messages. I am also working on setting up more notification types such as :

• Username Mentions
• Community Watchers
• Mod Reports
• User Applications

About the notification service. In order to provide push notifications, your account auth token (jwt) needs to be uploaded to the server. This is required in order to fetch content from your Lemmy account on your behalf. These tokens remain valid until you logout of Arctic, or change your password. No identifying data is collected for notifications, only a device token that Apple uses to forward the notifications to your device. When disabling notifications in Arctic, your auth and device token will be purged from the server.

Will push notifications be subscription based?

Running a notification server does cost money. While builing Arctic, I’ve always had the goal of keeping all features free for everyone in the spirit of the fediverse. With that said, I have been trying to come up with a modal that would allow me to add notifications without locking them behind a paywall.

I decided to offer basic notifications as a free service allowing everyone access to replies, messages, and mentions. Advanced notifications such as community watchers, Mod, and Admin notifications, there will be a small subscription fee.

I have not settled on pricing for for the subscription just yet. I’ll be offering these notifications for free during TestFlight beta testing.

v0.2.6 Release

Though this version is as primarily focused on push notifications, I also addressed a few other issues, and added a few features.

Arctic now has a Safari Extension, this extension allows you to open any Lemmy url from safari in Arctic. You can configure the extension to automatically open the page in Arctic, or add a banner to the top of the page so you can open the page in Arctic. The rest of the changes were primarily minor bug fixes.

v0.2.6.1 Release

This was simply a hotfix for a loading issue introduced in v0.2.6 that caused issues loading link previews, and scroll performance issues.

v0.2.6.1 Changelog

• Reverted some crash fixes from v0.2.6 that would cause link loading to fail, and scroll performance degradation.

v0.2.6 Changelog

• Added support for Account Notifications
• Added "Open In Arctic" Safari extension
• Fixed a bug that would cause a crash when parsing certain urls
• Fixed Post Compose View "Post" button not restoring after an error occurred
• Added a warning that shows when trying to submit a post without a title
• Fixed comment Scroll To Selection not always scrolling to the correct position
• Fixed comment separators not properly displaying on all comments
• Fixed comment highlighting not showing
• Fixed issue that could cause post titles to be cropped vertically when viewing an image post
• Fixed media viewer status bar not behaving correctly in some cases
• Fixed media viewer action buttons not showing when viewing a gallery
• Added swipe actions for voting in the inbox
• Fixed community feed action menu icons
• Added App Icon selection settings (only 2 icons at the moment)
• ~~Fixed some crashes that would occur randomly for some users due to tableview updates~~ (reverted in v0.2.6.1)
• Fixed moderated communities view not displaying communities when viewing profiles other than your own
• Fixed "Scroll To Top" tab bar action not always completing

I just learned about Arctic, but it’s a really nice iOS client for Lemmy! Thanks!
One thing I immediately missed is to vote a post or a comment by tapping on the small arrows indicating the amount of up- and downvotes. Would love to see this feature.

Arctic v0.2.5 is now out on TestFlight. This is a small update with just a few fixes and new features.

I’ve added an option to convert YouTube links to Piped. YouTube has a lot of restrictions in accessing direct links to videos, thus embedding YouTube videos in-line is unreliable at best unless using Web views which I do not plan on doing. Piped on the other hand is very simple to work with and embedded videos is simple and achievable. This initial implementation does have issues, namely videos may fail to load due to cloudflair on Piped instances. For this reason I’ve added a load balancing option for attempting to distribute Piped requests across several Piped instances.

I’ve also added swipe gestures configuration options for choosing your own actions in post/comment swipe menus. I also included a fix for the new swipe gestures being unusable on some cells.

Link post images are finally fixed for compact post cells, sorry that took so long. I also included some inbox improvements, so now the inbox will properly update once you’ve replied to a message or comment. You can also manually refresh the inbox.

You can see the full list of changes below.

v0.2.5 changes

• Comment usernames are in bold now for readability
• Added option to convert YouTube links to Piped links (post feed only)
• Added option to select which piped instance is used for inline video
• Update the post feed title according to the listing type
• Updated the elasticity of swipe action gestures
• Updated settings icons
• Added swipe gesture customization options
• Fixed link images not loading when using compact post layout
• Inbox now updates when replying to a comment
• Added support for refreshing the inbox

Arctic v0.2.4 is is out on TestFlight. This update is primarily focused on new features. I’ve added a few highly requested features. Firstly, a new comment jump button, for jumping between top level comments (tap for next comment, long press for previous comment). I’ve finally taken the time to implement distance based swipe actions, rather than the native swipe drawer. If you prefer the old drawer style, this can still be enabled in settings. Another exciting feature in this version is support for piped.video links. These links will now properly display metadata previews, and I also added an option to play Piped videos in-line in the posts feed.

Some other notable changes in this version include:

• Support for HLS video streams in the media player
• Options to limit image height in posts for managing large image sizes

The remainder of the changes are rather minor, and you can see the full change-log below.

v0.2.4 changes

• Added a jump button to the comments section
• Added new swipe action design, this is consistent with other apps behavior where actions are triggered based on distance, rather than opening a drawer. This is optional, an the original style is available in settings.
• Added image height options for post cells to constrain the maximum image height
• Added support for loading Piped video metadata, and playing Piped videos inline
• Added support for playing HLS (m3u8) streams
• Added the account username in the comment composer to see which account you are composing from
• Added auto-complete when typing an instance url in the Login view
• Added support for reordering the account list
• Added support for following communities from Lemmy Explorer
• Added experimental support for saving comment drafts
• Added prompt to login when opening the post/comment composer
• Fixed some issues with theme colors not applying in certain areas
• Fixed issue where swiping a post with an image would not work
• Fixed login button issues in the login controller
• Adjusted the colors of red posts to better distinguish between title an body
• Sharing post, or comment urls now shares the url to the local instance rather than the remote url for the content

Arctic v0.2.2 and v0.2.3 has been released on TestFlight. I’m slacking a little and did not post about the v0.2.2 release. These are both smaller releases without many major changes. I’ve been trying to keep the updates a little smaller than usual, so I can release them faster.

v0.2.2

To summarize v0.2.2, this was mostly geared towards moderation tools. I redesigned the ModLog and added some convenience actions for moderators such as an Undo feature for mod actions. I fixed several crashes, and issues to do with the mod tools released in v0.2.1. For users I added support for sharing videos from the media viewer without needing to save them first. Fixed a crash when changing accounts that was introduced in the previous version. You can read more about this release in the changelog below.

v0.2.3

As for v0.2.3, this was a much smaller release that was mainly intended to fix a parsing issue with Lemmy Explorer. However I also added a couple cool new features. Finally some app theming support, you can now customize Arctics tint color, and comment colors. I also added a comment feed view for viewing your instance comments out of context similar to the web UI. You can also access this for individual communities, however several instances hav this temporary disabled due to performance issues. For mods, I added support for removing entire comment threads, I’ve seen this requested by several mods across lemmy. I also added the ability for admins to purge content from the database.

Upcoming changes

• Refined theming support, a few areas were overlooked in the initial release.
• A new comment jump button, for quickly navigating between top level comments
• All new swipe action design that triggers actions based on distance rather than the current drawer style actions, of course if you prefer the current style, you can use that instead.
• Comment and Post drafts so you can pick up where you left off if you dismiss the compose view.

v0.2.3 Changelog

• Added App color themes
• Added Comment color themes
• Added Remove Thread mod action for removing entire comment threads
• Added comment action to preview the comments parent
• Added Comment list controller for viewing community comments
• Fixed parsing issue when viewing Lemmy Explorer communities list
• Added Admin purge (comment, user, post) actions to mod menu (note: for now, this is only enabled on communities moderated by the admin)

v0.2.2 Changelog

• Added stats to Lemmy Explorer instance list
• Added large number formatting eg: 1.2K vs 1200
• Added support for sharing videos without needing to save them first
• Added support for filtering by all in the Mod Log
• Added Mod Log quick actions including an undo option for moderators
• Added community Mod Log shortcut to community action menu
• Added option to display user avatar as the profile tab icon
• Added backend support for instance blocking on Lemmy v0.19
• Added support for authentication on Lemmy v0.19
• Open In Browser now opens links using your active instance, rather than the original instance
• Rewrote Upload History controller
• Redesigned Mod Log cells
• Fixed profile comments being in incorrect order
• Fixed Lemmy Explorer timestamps not displaying
• Fixed a crash when refreshing the reports list
• Fixed a crash when (un)resolving a post report
• Fixed cell highlighting issue in the Mod Log
• Fixed a potential crash when performing mod actions
• Fixed a potential crash when changing accounts
• Updated date formatting to support upcoming Lemmy v0.19
• Updated post cell layout, and tweaked design for readability
• Updated settings icons
• Updated subscriptions title index to no longer require a long press to activate

There is no error or anything when you try to make a post without logging in, it simply sit there w the spinning wheel until you hit cancel. It should prompt to login before user is allowed to compose a post.

And

When logging in, visually, it appears that the instance field defaults to lemmy.world, however the field is treated as blank

And and

Had to navigate away from login page after the above issue left the page in a faulted state and wouldn’t let me press “login” again after filling out the instance field.

This is such an important feature to me, as a person who really likes to engage in back and forth comment conversations, timely responses are immensely helpful, and only feasible with notifications.

I’m aware there are on going costs, personally I’m happy to pay a couple of bucks a month for push notifications alone. More if other features are also included.

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"

So far, Voiceover support is great! Thank you for that. I will report anything I find.