My iPhone is always in silent mode, but this also prevents Avelon from playing videos with sound. I guess playing sound should be independent of the ringtone silent mode.

But I really like it that there even is the possibility to watch videos in the app, I guess that's the first app supporting it.

Apologies if this has been posted before, or implemented without me finding how to do it.

Would be great if there'd be a button for jumping to the next top-level comment. Possibly at the lower-right corner, as some other apps. Long-press for previous would be great, too.

Yes, I know there's support for collapsing comments. But you have to have it in view to do that. If you're browsing a long thread and want to jump to the next top-level comment, it becomes a bit of a chore.

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

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!

[BUG]

Clicking on the Heading of the first post in any post feed is taking the page to the communities introductory page which is present above that post feed.

Hope you understand my wordings here.

Also, some of my previously mentioned visual changes are pending,

like

1. Placement of saved button in compact mode looks uneven as it changes position based on username placeholder but large post size mode looks pretty even( I have mentioned it with pictures in my previous UI BUG post )

2. Post size like large and compact mode remembers their mode as per user defined in each community like you said but the same large / compact mode is not remembering their user defined mode in My Post and Saved posts section in user account section ( They are in compact mode by default and even after changing them to large mode they forget their user defined mode once you go out and come back to that section. )

3. Also the un-saving button while swiping a saved post via medium left swipe gesture method is in GREEN colour.. It should be RED instead, same thing applies to saving a comment gesture as well.

4. Please add accent colour to the currently selected community in a subscription list just like it’s been applied to the bottom navigation bar icons.

5. The App icon has more whitish outer part surrounding it.. Could you experiment with other colour options which at least fills the white part or enlarge the inner part so that the inner blue part fills out the white part ?? Basically white is not pleasing to the eyes is what I’m trying to say here. 😅

[Feature Request]

1. Could you give us the option of backing up our settings in iCloud or something ??

Because each time I make lots of changes in settings to finally get the look I want in this app like font size and post size/comment and gesture and appearance changes.

It’s very helpful if a person with multiple accounts can have different settings.

Also helpful in case of profile based favourited subscriptions and the views we set on each community like large , gallery and compact.

And since it’s a BETA software, sometimes I reinstall the app and as the features grow its hard to remember the previous settings changes I have made.

2. Maybe in your Future To-Do list

Saving posts categories wise:

Give us the option of user customisable Category-Wise saving posts . (This feature was in Apollo ultra and if included this will be a game changer if adapted earlier than the competition)

The feed shows comments exist but when I enter the thread, there are no visible comments. Yes, the thread also says there are comments. I’m confused by this…

Any chance of Avelon working properly on iPadOS? It seems every other Lemmy app I’m using via TestFlight fills the screen properly on my iPad mini but Avelon doesn’t, it displays an iPhone sized window that you can only zoom in to sorta fit vertically. Having to use two different apps for my iPad and iPhone is the only thing keeping me from switching to Avelon as my primary app. It’s just so much nicer than the rest in every other meaningful way. Thx.

When checking the app, I was surprised when I saw that I only have a few subscriptions. But when I checked the other lemmy app that I’m using, it’s there.

Must be an issue in the fetching of the subscription of communities?

Recently encountered a bug when looking at some posts, the post that triggered this to happen to me is this meme post. It made my entire phone freeze, disabling the ability to change apps, open the power menu, go to the home screen, or basically anything. Apple changed the method to hard reset phones some time ago, if you don't know how to reset your iPhone without a functioning UI then read this apple page.

Hi guys! This update (version 1.0.2 build 12) brings more sweet features, including:

• Custom font support
  • Text size fully customizable!
• Hide read posts
  • Customizable per-feed or you can manually toggle it
• Mark posts read on scroll
• More swipe gestures:
  • Collapse comment thread
  • Mark post as read
• Unfinished replies are now saved as drafts
• Option to delete your embarassing comments
• Body preview for text posts
• More customization options:
  • Community icons & user avatars
  • Large vote buttons
  • Account avatar in bottom tab
  • Hide tab labels (super clean!)
  • Number of lines to show for text posts
• Download/share buttons in the image viewer
• Ellipsis buttons for posts & comments
  • Easily access common options
• Reworked thread rendering system
• Edited comments now has an edited icon
• Profile pages now have avatar images
• Aaaand of course a bunch of various UI improvements & bug fixes

Wanna check it out? Here's the link:

Download on Testflight

For you seasoned testers out there, I'd really like some feedback on any bugs you might find, especially for the mark-read-on-scroll and hide-read-posts feature, but of course everything else as well. Some of these systems were a bit tricky to get right, so I might have introduced a few new bugs here and there.

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

Sometimes the bottom nav bar moves a little up while scrolling, resulting in this.

Been noticing this from previous builds but I catch this occasionally.

Hi,

Sorry if this has been posted before.

Currently, it seems Avalon does not understand links like [!community@instan.ce](/c/community@instan.ce) is a link to a community, but treats it as an email address. Clicking on it starts an email draft to community@instan.ce.

Expected result when clicking would rather be to view the community. I guess the app is blind to the !?

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!

Hi @evgiz@lemm.ee,

(I don't know if posting here is the most useful way to bring this to you. Let me know if you prefer suggestions to be sent some other way.)

I was browsing communities and it took me a while to find the New sorting option. I know where the menu is, but the New option wasn't there. It was only after I clicked a few different options that I realised New wasn't shown because it was already selected. I could have probably told from the icon, but in trying so many Lemmy apps recently, I haven't yet learned what icon means what.

My suggestion is that the current sorting is shown in the drop-down menu, perhaps as a checked option.

Thanks again for your work on this app! I'm really enjoying using it since I found it.

I noticed that some kinds of posts are deemphasized in the large view: text posts are just the header and links show a "compact" view with only a small image on the left. That leads to these posts basically disappearing between posts with images which are huge in comparison.

I think it’d help to blow up the link preview for link posts and add a few lines of the description from text posts to make them stand out more by comparison. It’s currently quite easy to just glance over them.

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

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!

Hey! I like Avelon a lot, probably my preferred client. But, it crashes every time I try to post a reply. Is it still in development?

Thanks!

Am I missing something or is it not yet possible to post from Avelon?

Very promising app! Quickly become a favorite.

What I miss most, besides ability to post, is swipe actions. Swipe to vote etc.

Disable capitalization and spell-check in the login form fields.

The term link refers to text that can be interacted with, usually in a web page and usually to take a user to somewhere else. Better to use a term like domain in place of website link.

I’d like to see you add post creation. I’m having to post to this community using apps other than Avelon.

A few things in the Subscriptions view:

• It appears to sort in descending order by community name; be nice if I could control this
• No way to refresh; I have to restart the app if I subscribe to a new community

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