Avelon App

Title, don’t have much to add. Tried with 😎 and 🐓.

when watching an embedded video in avelon, its streaming smoothly while buffering, but the spinning loading icon is in the middle of the screen, blocking the view.

the yellow progress bar is already indicating the buffering, so couldnt we just remove the loading icon so we can see the content?

Every time I open the app I have to re-enter my login information. This only started recently. Am I missing an option to stay logged in?

Now and then when I open the app, it just crashes and closes. I tap the icon again and it opens fine. Anyone else having this issue?

As the title says, the shade of gray used for Pure Black theme makes most of the text using that shade borderline unreadable.

This problem is not present when using any other dark theme other than Pure Black.

Please could this be changed so that the text is as readable as with other themes?

I struggle to click on anything that has a height of 1 line of texts. Short comments, post titles… other stuff

It’s actually pretty aggravating.

Idk what the solution is for this, but it’s a problem I virtually never had w Apollo. Is the touch target only the line of text and not inclusive of the padding around the text?

Ios 17.0.3 Avalon 1.0.8

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/7163222

Hi everyone,

For the past weeks I've been working hard on a push notification service for Avelon that is finally ready for open beta! This feature involves a completely new cloud service that automatically notifies you whenever someone replies to your posts/comments, and it simultaneously supports multiple accounts you might have. Although the app itself doesn't change much with this new Testflight build, there's a lot of stuff happening in the background to make push notifications happen.

My goal with the open beta is to test the service with many more users to see how it scales under heavier load. I'm not sure how powerful of a server it'll need - and as many of you might know cloud compute isn't exactly cheap. The service isn't quite done yet, so while I keep working on it you should expect downtime and occasionally delayed notifications.

How to join

• Download the latest 1.0.8 testflight build
• Open Avelon and go to Settings/Notifications
• Enable notifications for the accounts you wanna use

When you're testing, I'm especially interested in verifying that you're not getting any duplicate notifications and that you're receiving notifications for all the accounts you've enabled. Also, please share any bugs you might find or thoughts about how to improve things!

Notifications should still work if you go back to the App Store version without deleting the app, but notifications won't open the post and the notification badge will probably not behave properly. This is just a result of the previous version not supporting notifications yet, and will ofc be resolved with the official release!

Technical stuff for those interested

The push notification service is written in Rust, which is a pretty awesome language. This is my first time using it for a complete solution, but I must say I'm already sold on the features the language offers. Ensuring performance and security was a breeze compared to many other languages I've used. For those unaware, Lemmy itself is also written in Rust.

I've prioritized making sure the service scales well with many users, whilst not being heavier than necessary on the Lemmy servers. All traffic from the Avelon service is properly tagged to make it easy for instance owners to verify that the traffic is legit, and not some kind of DOS attack. If the traffic turns out to be a bit heavy for any instance owners, please don't hesitate to contact me to discuss how I can tweak the service to be less demanding on your server.

With the addition of push notifications I'll also update the privacy badge on the App Store to include (opt-in) collection of device identifiers. This is just a practical necessity to know which device to send notifications to. Apple continuously shuffles these random IDs, and they are the only ones who know who each one belongs to. The Avelon service simply sends a notification with the ID to Apple, and they figure out which device to forward it to. And of course, if you disable push notifications in the app all your info is immediately deleted from the notification server.

Thanks for reading & helping me test!

I’m either blind or this isn’t a feature of this app yet, but there doesn’t seem to be a feature yet to add an account to a block list.

I’m just so tired of seeing b0t@zerobytes.monster posts.

I believe I’ve seen that Lemmy has a bot account flag for repost bots like b0t, it would great if you could filter all accounts flagged as bots too.

If Face ID unlock fails multiple times, the app offers an option to “Enter Password”, which leads to another set of Face ID attempts. If for whatever reason you can’t (or it’s inconvenient to) use Face ID, you’re essentially stuck.

Most apps, including the OS itself, offer an option to enter the device passcode after a few Face ID failures, and some even offer it right after the first failure alongside the retry option.

The only places I’ve seen the “Enter Password” option are banking apps which have their own underlying PINs, so they fall back to that instead of the device passcode. Since Avelon doesn’t have its own password or PIN, this expectedly leads to a loop of Face ID attempts.

Avelon version: 1.0.7.3

iOS version: 1.7.3

Device: iPhone 13 Pro

It would be practical, if taking posts button would being you to the top if you already scrolled some. If you’re on top, then it could open side menu as till now. This would be easier for refreshing the feed.

Missed a dm that wasn't displayed in the inbox. Stable

Thank you for Avelon!

Requesting an option to show the submitting user (submitter) in the Feed views, especially the Compact Post view.

I got used to this feature back in the Apollo days. Seeing the submitter gives more info on whether to open/view a post (i.e. is the poster a known bot? known troll? known spammer? have they posted previous un- or likeable content?)

Thank you for your consideration!

When scrolling down the normal view, some text is in gray and not white, so it’s hard to read. So it would be nice if we were able to change the text color 

Could a refresh button be added to top nav bar? I know it’s in the ellipse menu, but it would save a step. Maybe a pro option?

Also how about ability to hide a post.

Despite the setting for embedding videos into the feed being disabled, all YouTube links are actually embed links instead of regular ones. This is regardless of the underlying posts using regular YouTube links.

Example post: https://lemmy.world/post/6127532

When viewed in Safari, the post links to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA.

When viewed in Avelon, the post links to https://www.youtube.com/embed/5pYeoZaoWrA.

If the YouTube app is not installed, opening the YouTube link from Avelon will lead to a highly disruptive embedded version being opened in Safari.

Avelon version: 1.0.7.3

iOS version: 1.7.3

Device: iPhone 13 Pro

Sometimes I click a comment or swipe in from the right to collapse it, I want to reopen but it is very difficult to click on only the collapsed comment and not the commenter’s name.

Would it be possible to make swipe from the right to …uncollapse (expand?) the comment again. It’s one of those little things that would really improve the flow of reading through comments.

On a completely unrelated note, the saved draft for posts is very helpful. I would normally have to cut the text, go back to whatever, and then paste it back.

Hello,

Is Avelon pro upgrade family shareable? If not, would it perchance be possible to introduce a family pro option at a higher price?

According to Apple documentation, family sharing can be enabled on individual IAPs.

Thanks.

Avelon, version 1.0.7 from Appstore. Pro activated.

I’ve noticed this bug for sometime. While scrolling sometimes the context menu registers a touch and opens when not intended.

In a community feed, nbsp characters are escaped instead of rendered.

Hi!

We all try to make the lemmy fediverse active by posting interesting content! It's currently painful to share a picture I just took. I would love to share it easily.

Currently :

• I take a picture
• I select "share..." in the iOS menu
• I send it to myself as an email to resize it (otherwise it will be rejected because it's too heavy)
• I save the picture in my photos
• I launch a lemmy app
• I go to the right community
• I create a new post
• I browse the photo library to get the picture

What I would love :

• I take a picture
• I select "share..." in the iOS menu, I find a lemmy app
• I am ready to select the community
• (The lemmy app resizes the picture for me)

I know that it is not an easy feature to implement. However, the lemmy fediverse would gain activity from it.

Also : it's less painful, but sharing an URL directly from the browser would also be a must.

Hi everyone,

First of all, thanks so much for everyone using Avelon and everyone who've decided to support the development by upgrading, it really means a lot! All the feedback in the post following the release of pro was definitely insightful. If you're unaware, I recommend reading the post as well as my reply here.

I've decided to push towards a 1.0.7 release a bit earlier than planned to address everyone's feedback. My goal with these changes is to provide a wider range of features in a more basic free variant, whilst offering more extensive customization options and an even better experience as an optional upgrade. This way everyone gets to try out more stuff for free, and if you want the full capabilities you can feel confident that the features work as you'd expect. This setup is more in line with other apps as well as the feedback from all of you.

In addition to tweaks to the free tier, the update contains a new text selection tool, a new dark theme, the ability to lock the app with FaceID, more filtering options + lots of QOL improvements and bug fixes.

Full Changelog

Adjustments to the free/pro tiers

• Added a basic jump button to the free version
  • The smart jump button with extra settings and customisation remains pro
• Everyone now has access to a limited number of custom filters for free
  • The pro version includes unlimited filters and new filtering options
• The maximum number of profiles in the free tier is now three (guest + 2 custom accounts)
  • This change does not affect any accounts you've already added
  • The pro version has unlimited accounts
• Added a free 7 day trial option to enable everyone test out the pro features
• Added various descriptions to pro settings to more clearly explain what they do
• Replaced the groups “pro” tag in subscriptions with a link to a more details about the feature

New pro features

• Added ability to lock the app with FaceID
• Added new dark theme ‘Hacker man’
• Added option to place the smart jump button anywhere, not just around the edges
• Added ability to filter independently on either the post title or post body

New features, QOL improvements and bug fixes

• Added tool to select text from comments & posts
• Added ability to delete your own posts
• Added share option to links and comments
• Improved prioritizations for swipe gestures
  • This should prevent accidental downvotes when you’re trying to swipe back!
• Fixed issue where editing markdown links would sometimes show weird characters and symbols
• Limited the maximum number of smart link previews in posts
  • This should keep “link aggregation” posts from being unnecessarily long
• Fixed issue where adding accounts would sometimes fail
• Fixed issue where swipe-to-go-forward could sometimes break after tapping the navbar to go back
• Removed option to report/block yourself
• Lots of minor bug fixes and improvements