cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4709002

Hi everyone!

It's been quite the journey, but Avelon is finally on the App Store!

Click here to download!

The app is includes a lot of awesome features requested by the community, including:

• Sleek design that fits right in on iOS & iPadOS
• Highly customizable look & behavior
• Mark read on scroll & hide read posts
• Customizable swipe gestures
• Multiple account support
• Smart link previews in posts and comments
• Support for videos, gifs, photos & other media
• Custom font support
• Write replies with markdown highlighting
• Privacy focused - the app has no tracking of any kind
• Gallery mode + hide bars on scroll = full immersion ... and a lot more!

Screenshots

Here's some cool app store screenshots of the app:

Developing this app has been one of the best development experiences I've had, and I feel very privileged and happy to have been able to contribute to Lemmy in this way. Nothing is more motivating than seeing so many people already enjoying the app and providing suggestions and feedback.

I really hope you enjoy Avelon, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about what everyone thinks. Keep the feedback coming!

Thank you, Sigve Rokenes

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4073656

Heyo everyone,

This update brings a few cool new features, most notably:

• Smart link previews
  • Now shown in comments and posts
  • Previews for communities, users and regular links
• Image carousels
  • For posts with lots of images!
• iPad support
• Layout/ui tweaks
• Bug fixes and other improvements

Download on Testflight

Check out this image gallery in the latest build to see how it works:

(just scroll through it!)

I figured (like some other devs) that some iPad support is better than none. Though the layout is not built from the ground up for iPad, it now fills the whole screen and pushes in some content. This is similar to how other apps like Apollo did it, and it looks much nicer than than a scaled up phone app. I haven't had time to test this version much, so please let me know if you discover any weird stuff.

The update also introduces a custom markdown rendering system that enables me to add things like link previews and image carousels. Seems to work pretty well now, but could definitely be some bugs with it for certain posts - if you find any, let me know!

Hope you enjoy the update!

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/2944211

Hi everyone! Thanks for all the feedback so far, lot’s of really great suggestions and useful criticism! I’m very happy to see so many people using the app, nothing is more motivating honestly.

This update adds a bunch of requested features, including:

• Multiple account support
  • Hold down the tab-icon to switch!
• Profile pages
  • Tap any user to see their comments, posts and recent activity
• Favorite subscriptions
  • For those of you with just a tad too many communities to keep track of
• Share sheet integration for posts & images
• Added option to block communities/users
• Added new page to view saved comments
• Improved the UI for settings

Since the last update I’ve also added:

• Full-width swipe to go back (super nice for large phones!)
• Smarter option to show both downvotes and upvotes only for controversial …in addition to a bunch of bug fixes and improvements all-around.

Hope you enjoy the new changes, and let me know what you think!

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/2030083

Hi everyone!

First of all thank you for all the amazing feedback I have gotten so far. I was a bit overwhelmed by the response on my first release, but I'm happy to see so many people enjoying Avelon. This update addresses a ton of the most common feedback I have received with a lot of useful new features including swipe gestures, a new inbox and a new subscriptions page.

Download on Testflight

Community: !avelon@lemm.ee

Changelog

• Swipe gestures for posts and comments
  • Fully customizable! Head over to the new gestures page in settings
  • Quickly perform actions such as upvote, downvote, save and reply
  • Also added swipe gestures to various other parts of the UI
• Inbox to view your replies
  • Quickly respond using gestures
  • Quickly open the relevant post
• New subscriptions page
  • More compact, grouped alphabetically
  • Not a tab any more (reachable by swiping back in posts)
• Community links now work in-app
• Added ability to save comments
  • No way to see saved comments atm. Coming later!
• Added customizability to thumbnail position
• Add option to enable more sort options (6 hours, 12 hours, 3 months etc.)
• Add option to show both upvotes and downvotes
• Added ability to save etc. from within a post
• Add swipe gestures to the in-app-webview
• Add purple accent color (yellow too in previous build)
• Reworked navigation system (no longer brings you to a different tab unexpectedly)
• Restructured settings a bit (will be more changes here over time)
• Fixes issue where your own votes would often be counted twice
• Fixed some typos
• Fixed alignment issues with tab bar
• Fixed overflow issue with some posts (hopefully)
• Attempted to temporarily fix ios17 reply crash
• Lots of other things I probably should have written down earlier

Screenshots

Known Issues / Future Features

• Adding posts
• Viewing profile pages
• Viewing saved comments
• Blocking/filtering
• Multiple accounts
• Adjusting text size
• And more stuff!

Replies have been crashing on the iOS 17 beta and I've added a temporary fix that hopefully resolves this (though it lacks markdown highlighting). I'm not on the beta yet myself so unable to verify or add a proper fix for now, will look at this once I get a device on the beta.

Given how many features this update adds, I do expect the build to be a bit less stable than before. If you encounter any bugs/crashes I really appreciate your feedback, either here or through testflight.

Hope you enjoy the update, and let me know what you think about all the new features!

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.

Download Avelon (Testflight)

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!

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/1358038

Hi everyone! I'm happy to announce that my iOS Lemmy app "Avelon" is finally ready for beta testing! I've been working tirelessly on the app lately and I think it is turning into a quite solid experience now. I'm very excited to hear what you think and gather more feedback before I move towards an App Store release.

My focus for Avelon has been to polish the base functionality as much as possible to ensure that the day-to-day browsing feels as good as possible. I've also done things a bit differently to make it easier for new people to try out the Fediverse. Rather than requiring new users to look through a complicated list of instances the first time, the app automatically shuffles a list of preset instances so you don't need to think about it until later when you register. This will hopefully also reduce the load on individual servers.

Features

Avelon already supports quite a few cool features:

• Posts and feeds
  • Clean UI to explore all your feeds
  • A pretty nice comment view
  • Support for images, GIFs, videos, youtube
  • See community feeds and sidebars
  • Quick search communities and subscriptions
• Login to your account
  • Reply to posts/comments (with markdown highlighter!)
  • View and edit your old comments
  • Upvote comments and posts
  • View/manage your followed communities
• Design & customization
  • Dark and light mode with customizable accent color
  • Compact posts, large posts and gallery view
  • Footer/header bars automatically hide for a cleaner experience
  • Change behavior such as tap to collapse, default sorting etc.
  • Long press actions for a less cluttered interface

..and probably some other things I can't remember just now.

Screenshots

Check these out!

Join the beta

The beta is available on testflight through this link (limited to 1000 testers for now):

Join Avelon Beta on Testflight

The app is supported on all iPhones with iOS 16 and higher (worked ok on my old iPhone X!). I'd love to hear what you think about the overall user experience, design, functionality, stability as well as any bugs or issues you might find. A few important features are still missing, most notably adding new posts. I'd love to hear what additions you are most interested in me looking at first:

• Creating posts
• Viewing users comments/posts
• Saving posts/comments
• Report/mod tools
• Multiple accounts
• Themes/more customization
• Improved image/video viewer
• Anything else?

Thank you & future plans

First, I'd like to thank Christian Selig (the developer of the Apollo app) for creating a really amazing app that I've been using every day for the last several years. As you can tell, Avelon is definitely inspired by Apollo (though I think I've put my own personal spin on the design and functionality!).

If people enjoy Avelon I'd like to spend more of my free time working on it and improving the app over time. In the spirit of transparency, I'd like to mention that I might do some kind of "pro" version at some point later on to support the project. All the base functionality people need will of course be free, but pro features could be additional "nice-to-have" features like themes or advanced tools etc. I'm not planning to do anything paid just yet though, just wanted to mention it. Right now my focus is to provide a great experience and to help build the Lemmy platform into something even better.

Finally I'd like to thank the Lemmy developers as well as everyone using the platform. Everyone contributing is making this platform the amazing place it is turning into. I personally haven't browsed the site-that-should-not-be-named since the API shut down - I decided to spend all that time on developing this app instead. And I'm really excited to see what Lemmy becomes over the years.

Sigve Røkenes

/evgiz