idunnololz

I'm going to be implementing more user requests. If you have any leave them in the comments.

Changes so far:

• Changed the behavior of the navigation menu. If a navigation menu item is currently selected and it is tapped, the app will navigate you to the "home page" of that navigation item.
• Fixed several bugs related to the compose post screen.
• Fixed a bug where the create post screen mistakenly only shows comment drafts instead of post drafts.
• Changed the style of read posts to dim the entire post item. This behavior can be changed in settings.
• Added a setting to control whether videos should auto-play. Default true.
• Added new comment count to posts.
• Added a view to the post screen if there are no comments.

Welcome to v1.41.0. This release adds a feature I've wanted for a while now (but likely no one else wanted). This release adds the ability to record an advanced screenshot.

In some cases, posts and comments can contain animated GIFs. When taking screenshots of these, context may be lost because the GIF animation is removed. The record screenshot feature allows users to take a recording of a screenshot, preserving animated GIFs in posts or comments. The feature allows you to record a screenshot as either a GIF, MP4 or WEBM and contains a lot of configurable settings.

Note that this feature currently does not work for videos (eg. MP4s) in posts because the video player renders these in a specialized way that cannot be captured by the method used by the app.

Full changelog

• Added a feature to "record" a screenshot as a video or GIF.
• Added option to mark a post as read/unread in the post option's menu.
• Changed long tap on the header, expand button or the side to expand actions as well.
• Fixed a bug where links are invisible in conversations.

He's so cute when he's sleeping 😭

So Summit for Lemmy already supports "advanced screenshots" letting you take screenshots of posts and comments with ease, allowing you to include any and as many comments as you want. However this doesn't work as well if the post or comments have animated GIFs in them. I'm working on a feature that will allow you to take an "advanced screenshot" but as a GIF so you can capture any video or GIF as well.

Changes so far

• Added a feature to "record" a screenshot as a video or GIF.
• Fixed a bug where links are invisible in conversations.
• Changed long tap on the header, expand button or the side to expand actions as well.
• Added option to mark a post as read/unread in the post option's menu.

The focus of this release is DMs. Direct messages have been difficult to manage and respond to in the past especially for message chains. This release cleans up the DM experience to make them much easier to use.

Full changelog

• Redesigned the DM experience.
• Changed messages in the inbox. Messages sent by you will no longer show up in inbox.
• Make it more obvious when loading in the inbox screen(s)
• Changed the "Mark as read" gesture to toggle the read state of the post. Eg. if a post is read and the gesture "Mark as read" is performed, the post will be marked as unread.
• Added a fade effect to the bottom screen when screens are stacked together. Eg. when viewing a post from the community feed.
• When viewing a reply message in the inbox, added a button in the context section to make it easier to see the post of the reply.
• Fixed a bug where the navigation bar does not highlight the correct item in certain cases.
• Fixed a bug where the open link button is visible when no image is shown in the post list.
• Fixed some bugs that occur when viewing a link to a Lemmy post of another instance.
• Fixed some minor bugs with people search.

v1.40.1

There were some dependency issues so I had to do a version bump. There shouldn't be any changes from the base release though.

v1.40.2

• Fixed a bug where images are not shown/loaded within direct messages.
• Added a full text editor to the send message input field. When sending a direct message, you will be able to tap on the full editor button to open the "advanced text editor" to make it easier to compose more complex messages.
• Fixed a bug where the post in the "context" section of an inbox message would have a random amount of whitespace at the bottom.

Another angle

Making this post to track progress on the next release. Will decide on a title later.

Changes so far:

• Fixed a bug where the navigation bar does not highlight the correct item in certain cases.
• Fixed a bug where the open link button is visible when no image is shown in the post list.
• Changed messages in the inbox. Messages sent by you will no longer show up in inbox.
• Fixed some bugs that occur when viewing a link to a Lemmy post of another instance.
• Make it more obvious when loading in the inbox screen(s)
• Changed the "Mark as read" gesture to toggle the read state of the post. Eg. if a post is read and the gesture "Mark as read" is performed, the post will be marked as unread.
• Added a fade effect to the bottom screen when screens are stacked together. Eg. when viewing a post from the community feed.
• Fixed some minor bugs with people search.
• When viewing a reply message in the inbox, added a button in the context section to make it easier to see the post of the reply.
• Redesigned the DM system in the app completely.

Update

With how the release is going it's seeming very likely this release will focus on cleaning up the DM experience.

The current DM experience is pretty bad. Messages are littered everywhere and it's very difficult to follow a message chain. This wasn't high priority since it was assumed most users are not using DMs. However as other parts of the app becomes polished, DMs are suddenly the weakest part of the app.

The current minimum plan is to group DMs with individuals together into chains at the very least. Other improvements are still up in the air.

Unfortunately, designs of the DMs will probably be limited to what the Lemmy API can provide. For instance, I was exploring an email like approach where one item is shown per message thread however there is currently no API that returns only top level message threads. Instead you can only get individual messages. Of course we can still implement this on the client however it can lead to an excessive amount of network calls.

As an example, imagine a scenario where user A and B exchange a lot of message. Let's say they exchanged 1000 messages. Let's say the client is configured to fetch 50 messages at a time. Given this, if the user navigates to the messages screen the client will fetch 50 messages. The client will then group all 50 messages as a conversation between A and B. However since this is just one conversation, the client will need to fetch more messages to make sure there aren't any other conversations. This will repeat until all 1000 messages have been fetched. At this point the client is finally sure there are no other conversations and it will stop. This means that the client will need to make 20 network calls in order to load the messages screen which is pretty costly.

There are some solutions but they all vary in effort or usability. The easiest solution is to not collapse conversations in the messages screen. The downside here is usability as it would be difficult to look for specific conversations. The highest effort solution would be to group all messages on the messages screen and build a database on the client side that tracks all messages. By doing so, the first time messages are loaded might still be costly but subsequent refreshes should be relatively fast.

I'm still mulling over what to do here.

Update 2

I love you guys so I'm going to implement the best possible DM experience with no cut corners. It's going to take some time though.

Update 3

I think I can wrap this update up sometime this weekend. I think a release is possible by Monday (Aug, 19) if not earlier.

This update focuses on general app improvements and bug fixes.

Full changelog

• Added new image loading animation.
• Improved styling on collapsed comments. Voting on a collapsed comment will update the score and cause the score color to change.
• Fixed many bugs with the layout "list with cards". Specifically it was missing the voting buttons and the comments counter. This has been added. Several other fixes has also been applied for this layout.
• Fixed a bug where the header text of a post would be cut off when using certain layouts.
• Fixed a bug where the link icon would appear on a post even if the post does not contain a link.
• Fixed a bug where paragraphs within a spoiler block may not be correctly formatted.
• Support subscripts in markdown (for~example~)
• Fixed a bug where opening. closing and opening the same post will cause the post to not be highlighted when the post is closed.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes you can drag a blank window from the right side of the screen.
• Fixed a bug where the progress bar when loading videos does not conform to the app theme.

Been a minute since I last posted a picture of Sencha so here it is!