Hey everyone! For more than a month now I’ve been working hard on the biggest update to Avelon so far. Today I’m really excited to announce that it’s finally out on the App Store! The update includes a whole bunch of cool new features for people who want that little extra and QOL improvements all-around.
Some of the highlights of this update include:
- Community groups
- App themes
- Right-edge swipe-to-go-forward gesture
- Custom app icons
- GIF/video scrubbing
- Advanced filtering tools, including keywords & instances
- Fixes to a bunch of iOS 17 related issues
- New markdown editor tools
- Smart comment jump button
- Ability to manage and clear app cache
- Support for Lemmy 0.19RC
- Lots of bug fixes & improvements all around
I really appreciate everyone who has helped with beta testing during the 1.0.6 cycle, you guys are honestly great!! It’s super motivating to hear so many people enjoying the app, and as always I’m open to suggestions and feedback. I hope you find the Pro-model I’ve landed on a fair/decent way to run the app. I’ve tried my best to consider all factors like affordability, development, as well as the quality & quantity of what Pro offers - and I hope I’ve found a good middle ground.
As for the future: for 1.0.7 I’m thinking I’m gonna focus primarily on performance, stability & bug fixes, but I’ll probably throw in some more QOL features as well. Just let me know if you’re missing anything or if you find any pesky bugs or nuisances. Hope you enjoy the update!
Edit: Seems to be a slight issue with upgrading to pro, working on it 😅
Edit: Fixed!
Only thing missing imo is the ability to have the comment jump button in the middle instead of the sides
Snapping to the sides was actually harder to implement than just anywhere lol, I’ll throw in a toggle to allow placement anywhere in 1.0.7
Would it possible to have a demo and/or explanation as to how the Community Groups work? I’d be interested in that, but was sort of burned by my own expectations of Bean’s version of the feature not living up to reality.
Maybe someway for us to see how the Pro features work, to help push us over the edge of buying/subscribing.
Good idea! I’ll look at adding a free trial or other demo functionality.
Community groups let you add any number og communities (from any instance) into a named group that appears with your subscriptions on the “posts” tab. When you open it the feed works the same as usual, but will contain a mix of posts from the selected communities. The mix is designed to be even, so if one of the communities is much smaller you’ll still see posts from that one too. You can sort as usual, but the mix will try to remain even as long as there are enough posts to pick from.
What was the issue with Bean’s implementation?
Sweet, a free trial might be enough too!
My issue with Bean’s version is that it takes the different communities, but stacks the posts from each. Basically taking the top 10 posts from community 1, then appends top 10 posts from community 2, and so on. I feel it would be more useful to have all the posts (and even if it’s just 10) from each community and then sort. So they’re mixed together and you don’t have to scroll a lot to see “all” the relevant posts in the group.
And I’m not trying to be critical of you or Bean’s dev. Just sharing my opinion.
No worries, feedback is great. Avelon does basically the opposite of that, where it tries to interwine as much as possible (without being too heavy on the servers). Here’s an example:
Oh sweet! Thanks for all the prompt replies!
Just went to go purchase premium for the month to try it out, but it said it failed to connect to App Store. Would there be any reason for the app to not be able to connect?
Hope you’ll like it 😎 I misunderstood some stuff in Apple’s review process so the app store item is not available yet. Will hopefully be working within a few hours!
Any update to share?
Yeah sorry, forgot to update the post - everything is up now!
Is there anyway to see video and gifs expanded in full screen and/or landscape?
Not at the moment. Adding support for a full screen videoplayer is in my backlog!
Nice! Thanks!
I totally support y’all having a pro mode, so I don’t want this to come across as me trashing on that in general. But I’m really disappointed to see the Content Filtering options behind a paywall. There are obviously a lot of people who are just going to use that to tailor things more to their preferences. But there’s also a lot of people who would use it to filter out posts that are harmful for them. I think you should reconsider making that a free option.
Hmm, good point. I’ve tried to focus the update on more “power user” stuff that’s not strictly neccessary, but you’re right that this could be the case. I’ll think about it
Can you pin this and get rid of the other pin? Updates should be pined.
Yeah sure, updated now!
Thanks to the dev. It’s by far the most polished Lemmy app for iOS right now , and I’ve tried just about all of them.
The pricing is like, a week of morning coffees, so I’m not really sweating it. And that $14.99 for a year is a great option at $1.25/month if thirty bucks will break you.
I’m happy to have bought pro lifetime, and glad you’ve put the number of hours in developing Avelon. I look forward to seeing how it matures.
Oh, just FYI, I LOVE that Avelon is portrait only while scrolling threads. I browse a LOT with the phone while on the couch, or lying in bed, and currently NO other app stays in portrait when sideways. I don’t know any savages who read in landscape. That’s rightly reserved for videos or wide photos, in my opinion. It took Christian YEARS to figure out a toggle in Apollo where you could lock to portrait while browsing text, and auto-rotate only for videos or landscape-only media. It was why I bought Apollo Pro lifetime, finally! But, here’s your Pro lifetime subscription from me, so thanks for making it the way I like it already… ;)
Cheers
Thank you so much, really appreciate it! I’ve started to look at better full screen landscape support whilst keeping the portrait feeds, but yeah it’s more tricky to do than you’d think. For sure something I’d like to do eventually!
What are the prices for the upgrade options? I’m assuming they’re displayed when you choose an option, but since there’s an issue there I’m still in the dark.
Also, how do you attach images to replies?
