Hi there fellow Apple enthusiasts!
Yesterday I announced that my native iOS app for Lemmy called Avelon is finally ready for testing, and I figured some people here might also be interested in checking it out!
My focus for the app has been performance, design and ease of use. As you can probably tell I got a lot of inspiration from Apollo and other iOS-first apps - but I think I’ve added my own cool spin on both the design and functionality.
Here’s a couple screenshots of the app:
If you wanna try it out I’d greatly appreciate any feedback/suggestions so I know what to focus on next! I think the core experience is pretty solid already, but the app still lacks some important features such as adding new posts.
Avelon is developed in Swift using almost enitrely SwiftUI. For those unfamiliar, SwiftUI is the newest UI library by Apple intended to replace things like UIKit over time. SwiftUI is cross platform, so Avelon also runs on macOS actually, though the UI is not tweaked to fit mac just yet. The tech is really great to work with, and it makes it super easy to fit right into iOS. I posted some more details about the project over on the community page for the app here if you wanna check it out.
Thanks, let me know what you think!
The 3rd party app scene flourishing for Lemmy is the perfect “fuck you”.
Hey, one of the Mlem devs here, Welcome to the club. Be advised we are hitting issues getting on the AppStore, apparently Apple says that we are “exploiting the popularity of the Lemmy trademark”. You might have to deal with that once you submit… Good Luck, Your app is looking good. ❤️
It sometimes makes you wonder if the App store employees think before sending pushback like that.
The latest episode of ATP had a big rant about how fucking stupid app review is. It honestly seems like it’s being done by ChatGPT or something it’s so fucking stupid.
And here I thought nothing was going to pull me away from Voyager/WefWef
This is damn good
Downloaded. Looks really good so far
Awesome, looking forward to hearing what you think!
Didn’t even finish submitting my feedback before you pushed an update lol. Keep up the good work
Downloaded, so far i’m impressed!
So apparently Avelon doesn’t support iOS 15. So that’s a no go for me. If you aren’t specifically targeting iOS 16+ API’s consider targeting lower version of IOS. It’s why I’ll keep using Memmy.
Looks good so far. I’m really missing the swipe to up/downvote, reply, collaps, report options in compact mode. Any plans for something like that?
Definitely, I’ve implemented a few swipe actions already, but they’re still a bit buggy so I need to rework the gestures before it’s ready to release.
Edit: The latest release now has customizable swipe gestures!
Collapse seems to work for me. Otherwise, agreed. It’s much snappier than Memmy (what I’ve been using mostly thus far), on the upside!
Edit: also would like an option to see both upvote and downvote count
really enjoying the app so far, the onboarding process is amazing. I’d love an option to have big thumbnails when using the large post option like this: https://files.catbox.moe/6y6wzl.jpeg
This needs thumbnails on the left as well as marking post read on opening thumbnails, other than that it looks great!
Onboarding looks great and the performance is perhaps the best I’ve ever experienced trying various Lemmy apps.
Yep, an ability to switch thumbnails in compact mode to the left would be great. Agree with everyone else so far, really polished and super fast performance. Looking forward to seeing this mature.
Also, I can’t seem to work out how to tap someone’s name to access their profile. Since this app doesn’t handle links to other Lemmy instances internally (the “here” in your OP opens the browser rather than actually taking me to your post), I wanted to comment on your app’s community by finding it via your profile.
Am I just not hitting the correct pixels? Or are there no profile pages just now?
Also, the community icons are missing from the posts in the feed.
Or are there no profile pages just now?
No profile pages yet unfortunately. This + adding posts are probably the biggest features missing atm.
Since this app doesn’t handle links to other Lemmy instances internally
I’m planning to look at this, but it probably requires a bit of magic in the background to work properly.