cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25135715

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

Hey, got some new updates for ya!

I added instance blocking, and completely redesigned the page for managing blocks. For all three categories you're able to search, so you don't have to go to someone's profile or find a post by them to find a block button to click. Honestly this page looked awful before, the sizing was weird, if you blocked something with a long name the 'unblock' buttons would be huge. I mostly copied the features available on lemmy-ui (like the searching, and the fact that instance blocks are a thing now).

Tooltips in a couple places got some big upgrades!

User tooltips now show the full 'address' of the user (which it did before, but it wasn't super obvious what you were looking at), and you can now see when they made their account.

Community tooltips got the same address/origin date.

When you hover over a crosspost link it additionally shows the crosspost's title, who posted, when, the score, and comment counts. This should make it a lot easier to see where other discussion is actually happening.

The card layout has a new feature, a nice frosted glass background. This looks similar to how Photon renders its link previews. If you're not familiar with it, this is what I'm talking about.. The effect is fairly subtle because it stretches over the entire card and it could be distracting, I wanted to make sure a fully white image wouldn't make the text too hard to read.

It's on by default, but you can turn it off with the "Frosted glass background" checkbox in Alexandrite settings when your Feed Post Layout is set to Cards if you'd like. If you're curious how it's done, it loads a low resolution thumbnail, places it with a low opacity behind the card, and blurs it so it's less distracting and hides how pixelated it is. It works because all the gray background colors on the site (like all the gray backgrounds on cards) are transparent so when stacked on other gray backgrounds there's always a contrast in color without any extra work. If you don't want to load extra images just for this, or if the blur makes the site lag on a low spec device (didn't notice any impact on my pc), then you might want to turn this setting off.

Besides that, I bumped the node version the docker image uses, and I think that's about it.

Let me know if there's any features Alexandrite is missing that you'd really like! Especially interested in features you want that the default Lemmy UI has that I haven't added yet (like instance blocks until now, community creation/editing, emojis, user/community search when typing a @ or ! in the markdown editor, etc).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24943349

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

This time it's mostly UI changes I really wanted to make, and some things people have asked for.

All toolbar toggles and dropdowns are now these nicer looking dropdowns. They look a lot more consistently sized, everything has a label I also added "Moderator View" into that new dropdown.

The search page looks way nicer now, here's the before:

And now:

Added an option that lets you toggle between relative and absolute dates

Added an option for completely white/black backgrounds

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24823273

Smaller release, mostly focused on some styling changes and easy features.

In the settings you can now set a default comment sort, also added "Controversial"

Now in the community/user sidebar and community search results you will see the full 'address' of a community/user. Clicking the text or the button on the right side copies it to your clipboard. In search results this makes it a lot easier to see what exactly the community is, not just what the display name says it is.

When viewing the inbox, the "No More Messages" message has a "View Read" button, so if you wanted to view an already read notification you've got a nice big button to get there.

Buttons in the community header aren't transparent anymore so they're easier to see if the banner's image is busy.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24730515

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

Finally added image uploading, so this is going to be my first update post with images I'll be able to write all on Alexandrite :D

As mentioned in the post you can now attach images to things, this means both on the post via the file selector like on lemmy-ui:

Or you can attach images by pasting or using the upload button to insert an image in the markdown editor (post text, comments, etc).

You can also set your avatar and banner on the Lemmy tab of Settings

Banners on communities and users now show in the feed header instead of a smaller image at the top of the sidebar.

The sorting of communities when selecting one to make a new post (both the alphabetization of your subscribed communities and the popularity sorting of the search results) is better.

Fixed a 400 error that was happening when viewing modlog actions on a user.

This was the biggest change in quite a while, so please let me know if you have any issues with the update! Thanks for all the support, love hearing people like the stuff I'm making :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24517321

This release mostly is a redesign of the instance/community/user sidebars on the right side of those pages. Things are in clear sections, each in a collapsible section that remembers if it was open. So if you're tired of seeing your instance's description every time just close it and it'll stay closed.

Instances and communities now show their full stats, and there are now pages for the legal info and linked/blocked instances. The instance sidebar also shows the list of admins.

If you use the 'Redirect' feed layout setting added in the previous release it now responds to clicks directly on the image or the background of cards.

When looking at your own profile there will be an "Edit Profile" button at the top of the sidebar.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5928967

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

Just a few things this time, the biggest is mod team management. You can now add and remove mods from the "..." menu on posts and comments. You can also find links to the modlog to see what actions have been taken against that user.

You can also remove mods or leave the mod team of a community from inside the "Moderation" area of the sidebar (note: the "Modlog" link moved inside this section too as it's not useful to most people)

Alexandrite settings will now automatically update in every tab instantly, so if you change the theme in one tab, when you switch to another already open Alexandrite browser tab you'll notice it'll already be using your new theme.

When viewing reports, they will now be sorted by newest report first, instead of oldest post/comment first.

For the self hosters out there, Alexandrite should now have arm builds thanks to ismailkarsli on Github! (Thank you!) The image builds now take a little longer, and the build isn't quite done yet so you might have to wait a bit until it's available.

That's it for now. Next release will probably be Lemmy 0.19 support, and I believe I'll finally be able to add image uploading then too (it might be in the next release after 0.19 support).

Github release notes

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/4271786

I've been away on vacation but I'm back with a new release of Alexandrite!

The mod log is now implemented! At the moment you can see a community's modlog from the top of the community sidebar, and the instance modlog from the bottom of the instance sidebar (I'll likely change where these links are at some point). Now moderators should be able to do even more stuff without leaving Alexandrite.

Additionally there's a link to the modlog when viewing a user's profile (also in the sidebar), which lets you see the mod actions that have been performed on them. This should help moderators identify problematic users.

In both cases, you will see a content warning screen before being redirected to the actual modlog, but you can disable this for either all communities or for the ones you moderate in the settings.

Icons for NSFW communities will now be hidden unless you have "NSFW Thumbnails" set to "Show" in the settings. Previously it would just always show icons.

Moderators looking through reports will now see the post or comment's score (and vote breakdown on hover) so you can see at a glance what the community thought about something. Additionally it also shows how long ago a report was made.

Then just some random improvements. The community header's buttons now collapse into a "..." menu if the screen isn't wide enough to fit them all, and the header at the top of the page is now darker (in dark mode) and lighter (in light mode) which I think looks a lot nicer.

I'll soon release 0.8.5, but that'll just be a quick bug fix, as I realized when writing this post that the "No" button on the modlog content warning doesn't redirect to the right place sometimes.

You're now able to theme Alexandrite a lot more, I'm excited to see what color schemes you all can come up with!

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

There's now a light mode! Alexandrite will now detect your system's default color scheme and use that, but you can force dark or light mode in the settings. This is the default hue/saturation on light mode:

You can also change the saturation to make it as gray or as colorful as you want, plus you can customize the hues of links and up/downvote buttons (downvotes in screenshots just for demonstration!)

Here are the settings for themes now. There are numbers next to all the sliders to make it easier to share customizations! I might add a few presets in the future.

Posts look a little nicer. The content on them shows using similar styles to the previews on the cards. The "View Source" button is now a small button in the top right corner of the post.

Some 0.7.0 features I didn't mention here before:

There's an option when using the "List" post layout that shows a preview of the post content like the card layout does.

Oh speaking of version numbers Alexandrite now releases with version numbers! You can find the version number in use on the "About Alexandrite" page. You can read more on the version number announcement.

Lot of new features since my last post!

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

You can now pick between list (default), compact, and card layouts for posts in the feed. Use card if you want to see large images and a preview of the post content as you scroll (card is my favorite now).

Use compact if you want to see as many posts as possible.

The rest of these are things I've announced over at the Alexandrite community (!alexandrite@lemmy.world) but not here yet.

You can now create an account through Alexandrite.

Your instance/community/personal settings for discussion languages are now all taken into consideration, so if you ever saw a language_not_allowed error that should be fixed now. You can also set your discussion languages in the Lemmy tab of the settings (there still isn't any interface language or localization support yet but I want to fix that at some point).

You can now self host Alexandrite, check the Github readme for details. It's also on a.lemmy.world if you hadn't heard already.

You can search in comments and next/prev through the results

Comments by community moderators will now have a "Mod" badge next to their name.

Mods can also chose to remove content or make a temporary ban from the ban dialog.

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

Some big updates just arrived!

First, the instance you're on is now in the page URL, which means now you can send links to posts on Alexandrite to friends without them having to set an instance first (or know anything about Lemmy).

That helps to power the next feature which is an account switcher. This lets you switch between all of your accounts on the instance you're browsing! You can also set a default account to use for that instance. Now you could be logged in on multiple accounts across multiple instances just in different browser tabs if you wanted.

Because the instance is now in the URL, if your main account is on lemmy.world but you have an account on programming.dev and a friend sends you a link to a programming.dev post on Alexandrite you'll be signed in as your programming.dev user in that browser tab.

Two clicks to switch which instance you're using (based on what accounts you have)

If you have accounts on more than one instance you can pick which instance you see by default when you go to https://alexandrite.app with no instance in the url, or chose to login on any of the accounts you've signed in as previously from the login page. (And in case anyone was curious, no it does not store passwords).

Another new feature I recently added is a little hint for what a comment is a reply to once you finish reading a deeper thread, easier to understand with a screenshot:

You can also favorite communities to make them show up on the top in the left hand sidebar.

Next I planned on working on stuff for self hosting, so stay tuned.

I've added a bunch of new features to Alexandrite (a third party Lemmy alternate web UI for desktop)!

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

Lemmy Settings

You can now change most of Lemmy's settings (just not language/avatar/banner/2FA/password).

Mod tools

A lot of mod tools were added. You can view reports and do most things except appoint/removing mods and viewing the mod log. It was a lot of functionality to add at once, and it was working well in all my tests but if you notice anything odd or broken please let me know!

Scroll between top level comments buttons

Floating at the bottom of the page when viewing a post you will now see a little navigation bar that lets you scroll between comments (and a similar one on the post list that lets you scroll to the top of the page).

Better markdown editor

The text editor used when making posts/comments has been upgraded! Now you can find buttons for bold/italic etc, most of the things you can do on the official website.

If you have any issues let me know, or create an issue on Github.

I'm the dev of Alexandrite, a desktop-first alternative Lemmy web UI. If you missed it, here's my announcement.

alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github

I've been working on a load of stuff lately and I wanted to post an update on all the things I've added since the first announcement.

There's a new feed layout! Now when scrolling on a feed of posts, in addition to the old overlay view, you can now view a post side-by-side with the post list, which makes it easier to casually look through posts. By default it will pick the best layout for your screen size, but you can force it to use either the column or the overlay layout in the settings.

I've added some basic theming! All of the purple colors in text/borders/backgrounds you see on Alexandrite are based on the same hue, now you can completely change the look of the site with a slider in the settings. Here are some examples:

You can now block/unblock communities, as well as block communities directly from post lists!

You can now choose if NSFW thumbnails are either: hidden (unless you click it), blurred, or always shown.

Markdown formatting is much better. Most things are supported now, and Alexandrite will automatically detect links to users/communities/posts and change their URLs to their page on Alexandrite, making it easier to browse.

All of the Lemmy API calls are now client side, previously it would be proxied through Alexandrite's server, but that has been removed, so now nothing is sent to Alexandrite's servers. This should make it easier to self host, but I haven't yet explored that.

That's all the big important things. Lots of bug fixing behind the scenes too. Hope you like it!