A little update on this, I spent most of yesterday working on theme support, and I made a lot of progress. I have everything working, just a few details left to polish, and some work left on the editor.

It’s written in Swift. Originally I had planned to write it in Go, but I decided to try out Swift as a backend since I had never used Swift for web development. This allows me to share the same Lemmy API library and networking between both Arctic, and it’s notification server.

Exactly, I was actually planning to add a theme browser. I’m going to setup a service on Arctic’s website to host themes. Then you’ll be able to browse community themes in Arctic, and install them. I’ll also setup a community for arctic themes, so users can share their themes with screenshots etc.

I hadn’t really thought about it before, But it only took about 5 minutes to add support for a lighter variant of dark mode. I’ll include this in the next release.

I am however working on customizable theme support. It’ll allow for creating custom themes and changing just about any color you want in the app. This is taking me some time to build though, and it likely won’t be ready for a while.

My pleasure! I did not plan on such a long list of changes, I got a little carried away. I had a list of issues I had noticed over the last couple of months, and I was just planning to address those with this update. After such a long break from the project, I wasn’t in a huge rush to release this update. That gave me the time to work on bigger features like Mac support, and embedded content.

Always a pleasure, I’m excited to be working on Arctic again after such a long break!

To be fair, that feature list was completed before the surgery. I just had surgery on Monday. I figure if I’m going to be mostly bed bound for the next month, I could put that to some use and work on Arctic.

I definitely burnt myself out towards the beginning of summer, that’s what started my taking a break from development. Then between work, summer heat, and my injury, it took me a while to get back into the groove.

That is fair. There is a setting Settings > Appearance > Show Links In Comment which allows you to disable link previews in the comments section.

I do my best to fix issues as they are noticed, and I take all the feedback I can get. However, like you said, there is a much smaller following here than there is for apps like Voyager and Mlem, so I don’t get nearly as much feedback as I would like.

Being on an iPhone X makes sense. The iPhone X still had real force touch unlike all the newer phones which do not have pressure sensitive screens, and instead use a long-press for Haptic Touch. This should help in figuring out the issue you are having with links.

In Arctic tapping the active tab will scroll to the top, or act as a back gesture if you are already at the top. This was a feature that was requested early on from users coming over from Apollo, and missing that feature. I could definitely add an alternative option like this though.

It’s not abandoned. I had a very busy summer and did not have much time to work on it. I’m back at it now and I have a couple big updates coming over the next few weeks. Things should start picking up around here again. I plan to get back to weekly updates, I also have some time off from work next month so updates may be more frequent during that time.

Yes, I’m I’m working on finalizing some of the new features and bug fixes so I can push out the next release. If needed, I’ll disable some of the new features so I can push out a working build while I continue to work on them. Either way, I’ll have an update out before it expires.

Ahh, I see. Link previews can be disabled in settings. I added this before I had support for haptic tough on links. Also I enjoyed this feature from Apollo.

This is the first time I’ve heard about any issues with links. There is nothing special about the Haptic Touch for links, other than a custom background bubble. Are you jailbroken by chance? You’ve listed a few issues now that have never been reported before, and it makes me wonder if you perhaps have some conflicting tweaks that could be interfering. If not could you tell me your device and iOS version so I can try and figure out some of these issues.

Lemmy as well as most of the Fediverse uses the CommonMark Specification any markdown features I add will either be supported by CommonMark or by Lemmy. I do not want to create a a new specification, or use the Reddit specification unless it is adopted by Lemmy.

CommonMark does not support decimal numbers lists, so this is not an option as it would break list rendering on every other client. You have to remember that Lemmy is federated unlike Reddit. Users may be reading in a different app, on desktop, or even on a different platform like Mastodon. Changes like these need to be widely accepted and it would do more harm than good to implement breaking changes in Arctic that would not work correctly anywhere else.

Same goes for spoilers, and restricting italic markers. If these features do not meet the standard, then they will just cause harm.

As for in-line link previews. I’m not sure about this one. Most links are posted in context, like the middle of a sentence or paragraph. Putting previews in the middle like that would decrease readability. That’s partially why I treat them similar to footnotes and link them at the bottom of the context.

With that said I could add soupy for this, but it would be an optional feature that would be off by default.

There has been an open issue for this on the Lemmy-UI GitHub for 2 years now. They use the CommonMark specification in Lemmy and so do I for Arctic.

I do not want to try and strong arm the devs into adding a feature they may not want to add. Instead I may submit a pull request to Lemmy adding support for the inline spoiler tag. There does however seem to be some discrepancy about the format for the tag, since Markdown, nor html officially support inline spoilers.

Also I am aware of the superscript issue in ton the composer, I do plan on fixing this, but it is low priority at the moment.

I would love to do this, because you are right, the spoilers in Lemmy do not function the same as spoilers on any other platform. However I can’t add this as a feature since it would only be supported in Arctic and people browsing on desktop or any other client would not would not have support for this. So until Lemmy officially supports in-line spoilers like Reddit, we will have to make do with the current system.

It doesn’t make sense to allow composing posts or comments that could only be properly viewed in Arctic.

I like that idea more, I’ll definitely add support for this. Thanks for the idea!

1. This is odd. I’ll have to look into this. Notifications have been working fine for the last year, but I received 2 reports about this issue this week. I’ll try and track this down tonight.
2. I made some improvements to the bullet lists the other day, they will now have spacing between items in the list. For multiple paragraphs in list items, I’ll have to look into this, because you are right that they do not render correctly. All the text rendering in Arctic is completely custom, so it’s no surprise that missed some features. I will look into this though and try to find a solution.
3. It seems that iOS changed some things with the image picker, and it’s no longer necessary to ask for photos access permission when selecting a photo. I’m going to look into this and see if I can’t simplify things for limited access. It’s definitely not ideal to have to select photos twice.
4. As for displaying photos in-line, this is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while now, as currently any photos are just appended below the comment text. Like I said, the text rendering in Arctic is completely custom and this is a bit of a tricky task even though it may seem simple. For instance Apollo never managed to implement this either. IOS does support showing images in text views, though this would not work for gifs or videos due to limitations. I finally managed to get something working for this yesterday, and it’s now possible to display images or videos in-line. I do not have this fully implemented yet, as it does cause some text rendering issues that I’ll need to fix. I should definitely have this fully working here soon though. Also, with this new feature I should be able to improve support for spoilers and markdown tables using the same technique.

I can change it to to reddit instead of old.reddit it seems either way it links to the exact same page. I can see how that could be confusing to a novice user.

As for u/u_<user> in the link, I do filter those out so it will not show those in the results.

/c/ and /u/ were intentionally left unsupported due to this being a remnant prior to the new linking format of @<user>@<insatanc.xyz> and !<community>@<instance.xyz>. I can add support for these links though. I think for forward compatibility, I’ll have it automatically convert these links to the new format if one is typed.

I’ve finished up the reddit migrator for Arctic. This will behave exactly like the migrator in Voyager. Voyager did this vey well and I did not see much room for improvement. I made sure to give credit to Voyager for the feature idea.

I did experiment with loading reddit info to display in the feed such as subreddit icons, and subreddit descriptions and this worked, but it looks like reddit rate limits quite aggressively, so I could not include this in tool.

On a side not, these screenshots are from Arctic for MacOS which should be coming out next month if all goes well!

1. This is a strange one, I have not received any reports of this behavior until now. I did restart the notification server today to see if that may resolve this issue, but I will be taking larger look into this during the week to see if I can’t find what might be causing this. In the meantime, could you try disabling and re-enabling the notifications in arctic to see if that resolves the issue?

2. I will definitely add an option to cancel media uploads, this was a poor design choice on my part, I should have included a cancel feature from the start.

3. You are absolutely right, this has to do with granting access to new images, I managed to resolve this for the next update. Limited access makes things a little more complicated than it should be. Now with limited access, Arctic will ask you to grant access to new photos before asking to choose new photos to upload. This can be configured in Arctics settings to ask about granting access before each upload, or only doing so once per app session.

Yes I am the developer of Arctic, thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts. I’ll do my best to respond to all your feedback here.

1. Swipe Gesture: when I mentioned a new feature to disable swipe gestures I was only referring to swipe actions on cells, eg. (upvote, downvote, reply, share, etc) swipe navigation is still enabled when disabling swipe actions. However with swipe actions enabled, you can still use swipe gestures to navigate the app, you just have to start your swipe at the edge of the screen just like navigation in the Mail app for instance. With that said, based on this feedback I added a new setting to enable full-screen navigation gestures, with this you can swipe left or right to go forward or back from anywhere on the screen. This is not a default iOS navigation gesture which is why I did not opt to include this from the start.
2. Tap Gestures: This one I am unsure about, double tap to upvote makes sense, however Long Press, and Haptic Touch are the same thing on most devices now that Force Touch was removed from new devices, and there would be no good way to handle both on the same view. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by triggering something random every time? Do you mean swipe gestures are random?
3. Post Footers: currently the information on the bottom left of the posts is just statistics label, its meant as an overview of the post contents, not as an interactive element, that is why the label is small, since interaction is not intended. As for the vote buttons to the right, I could definitely make the configurable like the swipe actions so you could configure their actions. I’d prefer not to use the left information label as buttons, but I can look into adding more customization to this footer view as a whole.
4. The ••• menu: This is something I may be able to improve. I’ve opted to show repeated options like voting so the menu is consistent throughout the app. Users can change the swipe actions, and disable vote buttons, etc. so this menu may be the only place with those options left available, and I wanted that to be consistent in post feeds, open posts, comments, etc.
5. Comment Threads: This is something that definitely has room for improvement. I am working on adding profile pictures which should help improve following conversations. I do not want to differentiate between comments, replies, subreplies, etc. These are all just comments whether it is a reply to the post or a parent comment. I do plan to add support for continuous lines to the left to make it easier to follow comment depth, However the current layout is basically the standard as far as comment feeds are handled in most other apps I’ve used with comment chains.
6. Comment Profile Pictures: I mentioned this above, but this is something I am working on adding, I’ll hopefully have this included in the next update.
7. Creating and Managing Communities: This is a feature already, Though I may need to improve its visibility. For editing a community you moderate, you can open the ••• menu at the top of the screen when viewing a community feed and select Edit Community. Here you can edit the community metadata and settings. For managing user reports, you can open the same menu and open the Mod Zone (only available if you moderate at least one community) which is available in the profile tab, or the subscriptions list view. For creating communities, currently this is only available in the profile tab under the ••• menu, but I will also be adding this to the subscriptions feed for better visibility.
8. Default Tint Color: This one is something that won’t be changing. Arctic is modeled to behave and appear like a system app on iOS, most system apps use a default tint color of blue. Additionally, Arctic’s logo is primarily blue and this fits with Arctic’s branding. Blue is also a calming color with great contrast and legibility with both light and dark backgrounds. In designing Arctic, my primary influences were Apollo, and the system Mail app, both of which use the default system blue for the tint color. However, if you do not care for the default tint, you can always change it in Arctic’s Appearance settings. I am also in the process of adding full theming support for Arctic so you can customize the color scheme of basically every element in the app, and save multiple themes.

All of this is open to discussion, I’m always happy to add new features and improve Arctic. On that note, I did finish up the Reddit Migrator yesterday. The new migrator works almost exactly the same as the migrator in Voyager, It was done very well there and I did not see much room for improvement.

Thank you for all the feedback, it is always welcome!

[edit] I just finished number 6, comments will now display user avatar pictures. Users can enable or disable this feature in settings