v0.2.0 is out!

I believe I finally fixed the crashes some users were experiencing when refreshing posts feeds, if you still experience one of these crashes, please report it via TestFlight. Also, links in posts and comments are way easier to tap now, that was frustrating, I know. You can read about all the changes in this version below.

Upcoming features

Collapsible Comments has been implemented, and will be included in the next release. I’m working on integrating a Lemmyverse browser for exploring outside of your instance. I’m also working on proper a proper iPad layout. Browsing on iPad is a little off-putting at the moment, so hopefully I can fix that.

Issue Tracker

I completely forgot to include a link to the issue tracker in the last release, but if you would like to submit an issue, you can visit the GitHub Issue Tracker. I will add a Feature Request option soon.

v0.2.0 Changes

• Fixed a crash that would often occur when refreshing a post-feed
• Fixed pull to refresh not working in detailed post views
• Fixed Community Settings not properly loading the icon URL
• Fixed issue that could make links in post bodies difficult or impossible to tap
• Fixed issue that could make links in comment bodies difficult or impossible to tap
• Fixed a potential memory leak in the Posts Feed
• Workaround for an unsupported KBin link type, will redirect to browser for now
• Added ability to search posts from the posts feed, for searching limited to a single community
• Added support for creating communities from the Moderates section
• Added lock indicator for locked posts
• Added a title to the report view to indicate the type of report
• Added instance sidebars
• Added support for composing, and replying to Private Messages
• Added an instance browser to browse your instance's federation
• Added instance legal information to instance sidebars
• Added modlogs to the sidebar (WIP)
• Added option to report posts from the detailed posts view
• Tapping the active tabbar item will now scroll to the top, or pop to the previous view in all views
• The Media Viewer will now allow zooming up to 30x
• When submitting a post or comment, a progress indicator will now show to indicate it is working
• When editing a post that has an image as the URL, the image will be loaded and displayed

Beep boop bop, I’m a test post!

Arctic v0.1.9 is now available for testing.

Unfortunately, I was not able to implement Private Messages the way that I had hoped due to API limitations. In the next update I’ll at least add support for composing/replying to private messages. However until the API is updated, Arctic will display messages the same way Lemmy-UI handles it, as one big feed.

Arctic will now handle expired login sessions properly, and prompt you to re-authenticate if needed. This is due to the fact that Auth-tokens can be revoked for various reasons by instance admins, and Arctic used to just display server response errors in this case, rather than stating the session had expired.

Arctic also now supports reporting content, open the menu for any post/comment and tap report.

I’ve also added experimental post keyword filtering. So far this seems to be working well, and it does support basic regex expressions. Currently filtering is disabled in the search section as it has not way to query the server with filtering options. So it would require multiple paging requests in some cases to show any results. Hopefully I can find a way around this in the future.

You can read the full change-log below, and don’t hesitate to reply or create a post here with any feedback, issues, or suggestions.

v0.1.9 Changes

• Added community settings editor, for community moderators to update the sidebar of their communities
• Added keyword filtering, filter posts by keyword in either the title or body of the post
• Added option to report Posts/Comments
• Added an option that prompts the user to log in if their login session has expired. Admins can revoke all API tokens for various reasons, and this results in errors on the client side. Arctick now handles this scenario, and asks the user to re-authenticate.
• Added proper error message for when the login session has expired, rather than just a server status code
• Added option to select text from posts/comments to copy rather than just copying the whole contents
• Imgur videos should now correctly play inline
• Animated images now pause when offscreen like videos do
• Posts now resize when loading images without animating, this may be reverted. Let me know if scrolling feels better or worse

I haven’t been posting here about Arctic updates, and I realize that is a little counter productive towards building an active community here. So I would like to change that and start posting about changes in each release, and about active development.

I have been trying to wrap up a release every couple of days, and keep them coming as frequently as I can manage. Each update I try and throw in a mix of bug fixes and new features or quality of life improvements. I believe at this point I have all the crashes fixed except one, which I’ve received a good number of crash reports about. The crash usually happens after refreshing the posts feed when letting the app sit in the background for a while. Unfortunately I’ve not been able to reproduce this crash which makes it difficult to resolve. However I do know where the issue originates, and I hope to have it resolved in the next update.

What’s next?

In the next update I’m planning a few new features. First and foremost, is private messages. Currently, you can view private messages with Arctic, but there is no way to reply or create messages. I’ve been putting it off because I don’t have a clear idea of how I’d like to design this. I’ve never been a fan of the Messages app-like design within an app like Arctic, so I’m thinking of implementing it more like a forum than a chat app. Im also planning to add in UI support for post and comment reporting, as this is a critical feature that should already be implemented if I’m being honest. I’ll hopefully have instance sidebars added in the next update as well.

Going forward

Within the next couple of releases I’d like to tackle some of the biggest issues within Arctic currently. First is state synchronization. Currently the app state is poorly managed: for instance you can open a post and vote or comment on it, and back-out to the feed and the UI will not depict the changes. This is rather cumbersome task as UIKit does not have proper binding like SwiftUI does. But I have a good idea of how I will manage this.

The second issue will be improvements to scrolling performance in posts feeds. This is also a tricky task as UIKit does not handle changes to cell height in tables very well. Currently, Arctic tries its best to prefetch images before they are displayed to prevent having to resize visible cells, but dependent on network conditions, this may not always happen in time and it can cause some jumpy scrolling. I may never completely negate this issue without the the lemmy API providing image dimension data in the responses. However, I have some options for improving this that I have yet to try.

Lastly, I’d like to address issues with links being un-tappable in some posts. This one is really annoying, and honestly I’m just going to throw out the current system and rewrite the system using official techniques.

Some more thoughts

Once stability and core features are a bit more polished, I’ll be focusing on design. Currently Arctic is quite static in design, but I’d like to offer a bit more user control over appearance. Things like app-wide color themes, comment color themes, customizable action/swipe menus, etc. while implementing all of this, the settings section will also get an overhaul and be a little more organized.

I’ll also be working on implementing mod/admin tools. This is likely going to take some time, as there is a lot to implement, and familiarize myself with. I’ll keep everyone up to date on my progress with this when the time comes. I may also seek out some mod/admin users to test these features in a private testing group to avoid issues

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Anywho, I didn’t intend on this being such a blanketed post, so I will leave it at that. I’ve included change-logs below as I’m not sure if anyone reads release notes in TestFlight releases. I’ll be sure to make a new release post here every time I release an update going forward.

Thank you, to all of the users. You’ve all been great. Our numbers are still quite low at the moment, only 153 testers at the time of writing this. Hopefully I can bump those up with the coming releases.

v0.1.8

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• Fixed videos failing to load in the media viewer if more than one video is in the list
• Fixed crash when trying to share a video from the media viewer (for now, only the link will be shared. I will add an option to share the video file soon)
• Fixed videos not posing when swiping to the next page in the media viewer
• Fixed the search bar not always showing on the initial load of the Search tab
• Fixed issue where some community icons would fail to load
• Fixed issue where some animated images would not animate in the full post-view
• Fixed issue where link previews would fail to display a default icon if a site favicon is not found
• Fixed markdown not being applied when opening the post editor
• Added loading indicator in the media viewer when loading videos
• Added support for cross-posting (option is available in the action menus)
• Added a community selector to the post composer, for changing what community you are posting to
• Added support for scrolling to the top when pressing the posts tab while it's already active
• Added option to open the post composer when long pressing the posts tab
• Added reply context preview to the Reply Composer, for viewing the context in which you are replying to

v0.1.7 hotfix

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• Fixed crash when pressing the cancel button in the Search view
• Fixed placeholder text not hiding in the post editor when editing an existing post

v0.1.6

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• Redesigned Post Editor UI
• Fixed issue that could cause the login screen not to recognize when username/password was pasted
• Fixed crash that could occur while trying to scroll the subscriptions view before it's loaded
• Fixed issue causing some comments to be truncated (cut short)
• Fixed layout issue causing odd behavior with the statusbar on non-notched devices
• Fixed an issue that could cause some animated images in the post feed not to animate
• Added a Upload History manager for deleting previous media uploads
• Improved error messages to be more descriptive
• UI now depicts when an upload is in progress
• Media in comments can now be opened in the Meia Viewer
• Index scroller in the Subscriptions view is now easier to grab
• Increased tappable area for user/community labels in post-cells
• Tapping the stats section of a post cell now opens the post
• Improved success rate for losing YouTube videos
• Improved image-loading behavior in the post feed
• Hopefully, TOTP tokens will now be auto-filled when using a password manager to login

v0.1.5

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• Added compact post option (work in progress)
• Added a network monitor that will show when no network connection is available
• Added inbox paging, inboxes will now load more content when scrolling
• Added placeholder icon for users avatars in search view
• Updated Search and Profile styling to match that of the post feed (spacer between cells)
• Improved performance when scrolling posts in search and profile views
• UI now shows when you've reached the end of a feed, or the feed is empty when browsing posts

v0.1.4

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• Fixed account switcher positioning issue that occurred after switching accounts
• Added Guest Mode to the account switcher

v0.1.3

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• Added option to disable video scrubbing gesture
• Added upload history tracking to manage media uploads (No UI Yet)
• Fixed a crash that could occur while parsing username links
• Added image upload support to the markdown editor
• Provided default icons for communities without an icon
• Added BOT badge to post cells for showing bot accounts
• Community cells in the search tab now show more statistics
• Added option to override the interface style (light/dark)
• Added some experimental swiftUI views

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3634233

After a few delays, Arctic is has finally been submitted to TestFlight and got the green light. For those of you who don’t know what Arctic is, it’s a Lemmy client for iOS 15+ built in pure Swift.

Arctic began as just a little side project for me. As an avid Apollo user I was missing a feature rich and familiar client for IOS. So I started working on Arctic. My primary goal with the project has been creating a native UI appearance, and content presentation, focusing on putting the important content directly in the feed without feeling cluttered. I’m finally at a point where I feel Arctic is stable enough, and houses enough features to go forward with beta testing.

I’m currently testing out Reimplementing the UI in SwiftUI as it allows for quicker iteration, and less boilerplate code. Though I’m not sure about performance yet. SwiftUI seems to be lacking in certain areas such as prefetching APIs for heavy feeds etc. you can find an experimental post feed in settings that uses SwiftUI.

As of right now, I have not set up an issue tracker for Arctic. The reason for this is that I don’t know for sure if I will be Open Sourcing the project yet. I’d like to keep the issues/project in the same repository, and I’m unable to have a private repo with public issues. I’ll be deciding what route I would like to take over the next week or so.

While on the subject of open source, I’d like to mention that Arctic does not collect any information from users devices. The only user specific information that is stored is the Lemmy account JWT Auth token for communication with the Lemmy api. Absolutely no personal information is collected, or leaves your device. Currently I have no plans to implement any analytics in Arctic, and if I ever do, it will be on an opt-in basis, and be completely anonymous only tracking information relevant to Arctic support.

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Development

I feel the need to point out that I work a full time job, and am often busy outside of working. With that said Arctic development may be a bit slow compared to some of the other projects out there. I do however plan to release at leas one update every week for now. I will try to push out more frequently as my time permits, even if that means smaller hot-fix type releases. I do plan to support Arctic long term, as I’m already quite invested in the project and have really enjoyed working on it.

Anyways, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask questions, or offer feedback/suggestions . I’m quite busy most days, but I will do my best to respond as soon as possible.

Almost forgot the most important part, here is the link to Arctic TestFlight

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Current Features

• Submitting / Editing Posts
• Submitting / Editing Comments
• Voting on Posts / Comments
• Blocking Communities / Users / Instances
• Subscribing to Communities
• Search (URLs, communities, comments, posts, users)
• Rich link previews
• Uploading images
• Rich Markdown Editor
• Community browser
• Basic guest (anonymous) mode
• Multiple accounts, and quick switcher
• Integrated Media Viewer
• Upload manager manage previous media uploads)
• In-line YouTube videos (experimental, this seems to have broken with recent changes to the YouTube api)

Known Issues:

• Some in-line links do not recognize taps, I’m looking into overhauling the Markdown rendering and may be switching to swift UI for this, as it is better suited for that task instead of UIKit
• State Sync, The UI does not update in all cases to reflect changes such as voting on a post, and then viewing it in the post feed
• Some media fails to load and is unhandled by the UI
• Scrolling performance needs improvement
• Long usernames/community names can overlap action buttons
• Fast scrolling can result in user/community icons showing in the wrong cell
• Videos do not display in image gallery previews
• YouTube videos fail to load at times
• No spoiler support at the moment
• No in-line images Yet
• Private Messages are not currently supported, they will be coming soon

Previews

After a few delays, Arctic is has finally been submitted to TestFlight and got the green light. For those of you who don’t know what Arctic is, it’s a Lemmy client for iOS 15+ built in pure Swift.

Arctic began as just a little side project for me. As an avid Apollo user I was missing a feature rich and familiar client for IOS. So I started working on Arctic. My primary goal with the project has been creating a native UI appearance, and content presentation, focusing on putting the important content directly in the feed without feeling cluttered. I’m finally at a point where I feel Arctic is stable enough, and houses enough features to go forward with beta testing.

I’m currently testing out Reimplementing the UI in SwiftUI as it allows for quicker iteration, and less boilerplate code. Though I’m not sure about performance yet. SwiftUI seems to be lacking in certain areas such as prefetching APIs for heavy feeds etc. you can find an experimental post feed in settings that uses SwiftUI.

As of right now, I have not set up an issue tracker for Arctic. The reason for this is that I don’t know for sure if I will be Open Sourcing the project yet. I’d like to keep the issues/project in the same repository, and I’m unable to have a private repo with public issues. I’ll be deciding what route I would like to take over the next week or so.

While on the subject of open source, I’d like to mention that Arctic does not collect any information from users devices. The only user specific information that is stored is the Lemmy account JWT Auth token for communication with the Lemmy api. Absolutely no personal information is collected, or leaves your device. Currently I have no plans to implement any analytics in Arctic, and if I ever do, it will be on an opt-in basis, and be completely anonymous only tracking information relevant to Arctic support.

---

Development

I feel the need to point out that I work a full time job, and am often busy outside of working. With that said Arctic development may be a bit slow compared to some of the other projects out there. I do however plan to release at leas one update every week for now. I will try to push out more frequently as my time permits, even if that means smaller hot-fix type releases. I do plan to support Arctic long term, as I’m already quite invested in the project and have really enjoyed working on it.

Anyways, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask questions, or offer feedback/suggestions . I’m quite busy most days, but I will do my best to respond as soon as possible.

Almost forgot the most important part, here is the link to Arctic TestFlight

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Current Features

• Submitting / Editing Posts
• Submitting / Editing Comments
• Voting on Posts / Comments
• Blocking Communities / Users / Instances
• Subscribing to Communities
• Search (URLs, communities, comments, posts, users)
• Rich link previews
• Uploading images
• Rich Markdown Editor
• Community browser
• Basic guest (anonymous) mode
• Multiple accounts, and quick switcher
• Integrated Media Viewer
• Upload manager manage previous media uploads)
• In-line YouTube videos (experimental, this seems to have broken with recent changes to the YouTube api)

Known Issues:

• Some in-line links do not recognize taps, I’m looking into overhauling the Markdown rendering and may be switching to swift UI for this, as it is better suited for that task instead of UIKit
• State Sync, The UI does not update in all cases to reflect changes such as voting on a post, and then viewing it in the post feed
• Some media fails to load and is unhandled by the UI
• Scrolling performance needs improvement
• Long usernames/community names can overlap action buttons
• Fast scrolling can result in user/community icons showing in the wrong cell
• Videos do not display in image gallery previews
• YouTube videos fail to load at times
• No spoiler support at the moment
• No in-line images Yet
• Private Messages are not currently supported, they will be coming soon

Previews

I’m in the process of submitting my Lemmy client (Arctic) to TestFlight, and I had some concerns about NSFW options in my app.

As per section 1.2 User-Generated Content it states that NSFW content needs to be disabled by default, and can only be enabled through the website.

Apps with user-generated content or services that end up being used primarily for pornographic content, Chatroulette-style experiences, objectification of real people (e.g. “hot-or-not” voting), making physical threats, or bullying do not belong on the App Store and may be removed without notice. If your app includes user-generated content from a web-based service, it may display incidental mature “NSFW” content, provided that the content is hidden by default and only displayed when the user turns it on via your website.

Does this mean that I am not aloud to include any options in my apps interface regarding NSFW content, eg: Blur / Hide NSFW Content, Even if the content is hidden by default?

Any pointers here would be useful. I do see that other Lemmy clients are including options within apps and have not had any issues so far, but the policy seems to indicate this is not allowed.

I just wanted to post a little update on Arctic’ development. I’m a little bit behind on my original release target. I moved to a new house last week, and have been busy with the logistics of that. I also encountered some performance issues with Arctic that took some time to resolve.

Arctic is finally reaching my original MVP (minimum viable product) goals and should be able to push the project to TestFlight this week. I have a couple of usability features I’d like to polish up/add before releasing. To name a few:

• Improve Markdown editor for comments and posts (currently writing this from Arctic, and the editor is lacking polish)
• Improve performance around media playback for video types (mov, mp4, hsl, etc)
• Implement better error handling to notify the user if something does not succeed
• Add support for spoilers

As of right now Arctic has a a fairly full feature set for the initial release. To name a few off the top of my head:

• Subscription Feed
• Post Feed
• Post View
• Inbox (Comments, Replies, Mentions, Messages)
• Search (Posts, Comments, Communities, Users)
• Submitting/Editing Comments
• Submitting/Editing Posts
• View Community Sidebars
• (Un)Subscribe, (Un)Block, (Un)Hide Communities and Users
• Options for making posts as read
• Supports dynamic type for respecting system font size settings NSFW blurring/filtering
• Basic support for handling lemmy URLs in app (WIP)

There is quite a bit more to mention, and I will try and compile a complete feature/issue list before releasing.

In the interest of submitting this post before my going back to work (I’m currently on my lunch break) I will wrap this up here. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions/suggestions. I will also try and upload more screenshots of Arctic before releasing.

Also, Arctic is still in need of a proper icon. I whipped one up in Sketch, and it’s rather pitiful.

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Arctic

Arctic is a Lemmy client for iOS built in pure Swift. It currently supports iOS 15+ and Lemmy v0.17+

This app is still in very early development stages, and public alpha releases have not been opened yet. The first public TestFlight build will be available in the coming weeks

Arctic aims to be a fully featured Lemmy client focusing on content presentation, native UI, and intuitive controls. With Lemmy being a link aggregator, Arctic features rich link previews, and inline media placing the content right in your feed, rather than at the end of a link.

Features

• A powerful media viewer supporting static images, gif, webp, video, and audio support coming soon
• Matches Lemmy web search 1:1, meaning you can search users, comments, communities, and even federate with new communities using the full community address eg: [email protected] or https://lemmy.ml/c/meta
• Lemmy links are also parsed and presented in app rather than opening in the browser, if the link is not federated with your instance, you have the option to federate it. This is a work in progress, but when opening a link to community that is not federated with your instance, you can also import the post history to your instance so you can view the full community, not just what’s been posted since federating.
• Arctic also supports multiple accounts that can easily be switched between at any time.
• Community browser, for browsing all communities federated with your instance
• Profile viewer for viewing any users profile and traversing their content
• Inbox for managing replies, mentions, and private messages
• Report tools for notifying mods of content, or users
• For a complete list of features, check back later, or feel free to reach out and ask me.

Arctic is in need of an icon, and I am not an artist. Any designers interested in helping feel free to contact me.

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