Summit

Been playing with a new design for the search screen. This change was prompted by a user who wanted a faster way to access subscribed communities. This design also suggests some communities to users which could be cool.

For suggestions, I have a few options. I think the best way to implement it would be to create a server that generates community suggestions however this would incur a monthly cost. I think if I go this route I will create the start of a backend for Summit and open source it. The ideal situation is to get the monthly server cost covered by donations but I can also cover the cost. It should be around ~10-15 CAD/mo.

If any one has any suggestions/concerns feel free to comment.

This has been something I've been wanting to do for a while. The app has been pretty stable recently so I can take a moment to work on a simple website for it. The purpose of the website is to have an official "front page" for the app.

Currently you have to press view comment raw and then select all the text, then copy it. It'd be nice if there was a quicker way to copy the comment text.

Back from vacation, but I'm unfortunately a bit sick. Anyhow...

Changes so far:

• Fixed a bug where the wrong icon is shown when viewing an instance's info.
• Fixed a bug where the title is shown when it should be hidden on the community info/instance info screen.
• UI update for the emoji picker popup.
• Added a settings screen for the emoji picker, allowing users to modify or add emojis.
• Cleaned up the settings for post/comment scores. Changed settings so that there is one setting for post scores and one for comment scores. There are three possible options for both settings: show scores (default), show up and down votes and hide scores.
• Added a new setting to disable markdown parsing for post titles.
• Added a menu option to post/comments to copy it's contents.
• Updated the UI for deleted/removed posts so it has a distinct looked.
• Added a "Go to" dialog accessible in the main menu. This dialog allows you to jump to any Lemmy page directly provided you have a link.
• Added a setting to adjust the image size in the post feed.

Update

Quick update on what I'm working on these days. I'm currently working on a website for Summit. No, I am not making a web version of Summit. This is specifically a website to showcase the app and direct users to the relevant pages for the app. This work is specifically done to target people who might search for "Summit for Lemmy" or for sharing purposes. I've had the idea for a while now and I think right now is a good time to make the website.

Update 2

I'm experimenting with translating the app via "AI" since it's a pretty cheap and fast way to localize the entire app.

Every once in a while my feed contains a post with a title that begins with a hashmark, most frequently either microblog type posts with hashtags or numbered project update posts. Summit dutifully renders these titles as if they were markdown titles with a huge font. I would very much appreciate an option to render post titles as-is instead.

It'd be nice if it a feature could be added that would allow you to adjust the size of the list of posts and the comment view. A similar feature is available in Hacki which lets adjust the column size by dragging the divider between the list of posts and the list of comments

No guarantees I'll read anything posted here until then. See ya!

Edit: Vacation got extended one day from the 19th to the 20th because I was sick with a fever for a few days during vacation and I was bed ridden. I extended my vacation to see/do more.

I have some plans for v1.43 that I will add here later. For now, I'm just going to be doing some quick bug fixes. I've been fairly busy in my personal life outside of work so I haven't had as much time to work on Summit. Progress is still being made, just slightly slower. I will also be going on vacation from the beginning of October. My extreme stretch goal would be to release v1.43 well before I go on vacation so I have some time to polish the release before I'm on vacation but we shall see if that's feasible.

Changes so far

• Fixed a crash that occurs when images are uploaded using Imgur.
• Fixed a bug where read posts appear as unread if a post is hidden.
• Changed the quote button when creating a comment. If text is selected from the "replying to" box when the quote button is tapped, that text will automatically be populated within the quote block.
• Fixed an issue where the title of a post is not shown in the detailed view.

Update

Whoops I accidentally put [Release] in the title. This has been corrected.

I will sometimes get a message notification and when I click the icon, it spins the loading animation and another refresh animation above it, but it seems to freeze/hang on actually loading the message. If I click on All messages then it loads it instantly.

Seems to happen most on messages I received while I'm actively using the app, not when it first opens and detects messages received. It will also at times do the spinning animations of it shows no messages, but I click on the icon to do a manual refresh/message check.

It's been occurring for a few days, maybe a week now, but I hadn't had much solid info on when/where there issue was coming from, but now having the click All workaround, I felt that might give you some place to start debugging. Let me know if there's anything else I might be able to look for or screenshot, as I don't know how recreatable something like this is.

I've noticed some different behavior of the drafts lately, but I hadn't noticed any release notes about it. When editing and then re-saving, it now overwrites the original. This bit me the first time I saw it, as when I went to delete the old version, that meant I deleted the only version. I like this behavior better by default I think, but was there a release post with changes I missed?

I was also wondering if the post preview could be worked into the draft section, perhaps via a long press to get the post preview window, or maybe different view options like with the post feed. I've built up a bit of a surplus of future content, so I forget which post is which, and with it not saving backups now, I worry about loading the draft to the post screen and messing it up somehow without having a backup now, so having the ability to preview with image content viewable would let me see which draft is which easier without the chance to accidentally edit and moving the draft up to the top instead of keeping it chronological.

As usual, I feel this may be an "only me" problem, so no priority here unless some of this behavior was an unintentional result of another update.

Thank you as always for your great work. Your frequency of updates and overall quality of the app is top notch!

Last release added some features I wanted in the app. So to balance it out, this release will be focused on adding features users want.

I got a large influx of feature requests which is great.

Since there are so many feature requests I am going to break this release into multiple smaller parts. This way I can push out new features as they are implemented instead of doing a massive release all at once.

Full changelog

• Added a setting to control whether videos should auto-play. Default true.
• Added new comment count to posts.
• Added a view to the post screen if there are no comments.
• Added a setting to enable uploading images to Imgur.
• Added a setting to control how many animations are enabled within the app
• Added a setting to adjust the caching policy for the app. The options are aggressive, moderate (default), lite and minimum. Aggressive will cause the cache to be used more often resulting in better performance but things might be stale. Minimum will greatly reduce what is cached, reducing performance but ensuring things are up to date.
• Added a button to view the browsing history in the history settings screen.
• Changed the behavior of the navigation menu. If a navigation menu item is currently selected and it is tapped, the app will navigate you to the "home page" of that navigation item.
• Changed the style of read posts to dim the entire post item. This behavior can be changed in settings.
• Changed notification behavior so that when a notification is tapped, the inbox screen will auto-refresh unread messages.
• Changed the browsing history screen to open pages within itself instead of within home. Eg. if you tap on a post in the history screen, the post will now open in the history screen. This makes the behavior more consistent with other screens such as inbox or saved.
• Fixed several bugs related to the compose post screen.
• Fixed a bug where the create post screen mistakenly only shows comment drafts instead of post drafts.
• Fixed a bug where the loading indicator is not shown when comments are still loading.
• Fixed a bug where the imageviewer will appear unresponsive if the user leaves the app and then comes back.
• Fixed a bug where tapping on a notification item will create a weird back stack state. This fix will make navigation more intuitive.
• Fixed a bug where the inbox screen will automatically open an inbox item every time it's opened if a notification was tapped before.
• Fixed a bug where tapping on a notification will cause the inbox screen to be stuck in a weird state where certain actions will be ignored/do nothing.
• Fixed several crashes
• Fixed a bug where errors are cut off or not centered properly.

v1.42.1

• Added a setting to enable uploading images to Imgur.
• Fixed a bug where the loading indicator is not shown when comments are still loading.
• Added a setting to control how many animations are enabled within the app

v1.42.2

• Fixed a bug where posts will become unread if the app is closed and opened again.
• Fixed a bug introduced by the animation setting change. When expanding a post in the community post feed screen, sometimes the post will not expand.

v1.42.3

• Fixed a bug where post thumbnails will disappear sometimes when the post is tapped.
• Fixed a bug where the imageviewer will appear unresponsive if the user leaves the app and then comes back.

v1.42.4

• Fixed a bug in the post list where the content will disappear when tapped. This only affects the full content layout.

v1.42.5

• Fixed a bug where tapping on a notification item will create a weird back stack state. This fix will make navigation more intuitive.
• Fixed a bug where the inbox screen will automatically open an inbox item every time it's opened if a notification was tapped before.
• Fixed a bug where tapping on a notification will cause the inbox screen to be stuck in a weird state where certain actions will be ignored/do nothing.
• Changed notification behavior so that when a notification is tapped, the inbox screen will auto-refresh unread messages.
• Added a button to view the browsing history in the history settings screen.
• Changed the browsing history screen to open pages within itself instead of within home. Eg. if you tap on a post in the history screen, the post will now open in the history screen. This makes the behavior more consistent with other screens such as inbox or saved.
• Added a setting to adjust the caching policy for the app. The options are aggressive, moderate (default), lite and minimum. Aggressive will cause the cache to be used more often resulting in better performance but things might be stale. Minimum will greatly reduce what is cached, reducing performance but ensuring things are up to date.
• Fixed several crashes

v1.42.6

• Fixed a bug where errors are cut off or not centered properly.

v1.42.7

• Fixed a bug where importing settings can cause crashes.
• Tighten up some margins/padding.
• Added a setting to enable condensed style for comment headers.

v1.42.8

• Changed spoiler tags to make the space between ::: and spoiler optional.

Update

v1.42.1 is being release at the time of writing (9/2/2024). It adds more user requested features.

Update 2

v1.42.2 is released to address a bug in v1.42.1.

Update 3

I'm going to be wrapping up on community suggestions work at the end of this weekend. I will try to implement as many of the remaining suggestions as I can however it's unlikely I will be able to implement all of them. If I cannot implement your suggestion in time, I will implement your suggestion in a future release. It just means that your suggestion might not be prioritized.

The reason why I am doing this is so that I can prioritize implementing other features that I think would improve the app. As the community suggestions release wraps up I want to thank everyone who shared their suggestions during the release.

Update 4

Released v1.42.5 which contains the last of the user requested features I will implement for this release.

Update 5

Fixed some bugs and doing another release.

Update 6

Fixing more bugs.

• Fixed a bug where importing settings can cause crashes.
• Tighten up some margins/padding.
• Added a setting to enable condensed style for comment headers.

Update 7

Fixing more issues.

• The app always assumed that spoiler tags had to start with ::: spoiler, however I tested this on the website and actually the space between ::: and spoiler is optional. Eg. the website renders :::spoiler as a spoiler block. So for parity, I am changing the logic in the app to also allow :::spoiler.

I'm going to be implementing more user requests. If you have any leave them in the comments.

Changes so far:

• Changed the behavior of the navigation menu. If a navigation menu item is currently selected and it is tapped, the app will navigate you to the "home page" of that navigation item.
• Fixed several bugs related to the compose post screen.
• Fixed a bug where the create post screen mistakenly only shows comment drafts instead of post drafts.
• Changed the style of read posts to dim the entire post item. This behavior can be changed in settings.
• Added a setting to control whether videos should auto-play. Default true.
• Added new comment count to posts.
• Added a view to the post screen if there are no comments.

Welcome to v1.41.0. This release adds a feature I've wanted for a while now (but likely no one else wanted). This release adds the ability to record an advanced screenshot.

In some cases, posts and comments can contain animated GIFs. When taking screenshots of these, context may be lost because the GIF animation is removed. The record screenshot feature allows users to take a recording of a screenshot, preserving animated GIFs in posts or comments. The feature allows you to record a screenshot as either a GIF, MP4 or WEBM and contains a lot of configurable settings.

Note that this feature currently does not work for videos (eg. MP4s) in posts because the video player renders these in a specialized way that cannot be captured by the method used by the app.

Full changelog

• Added a feature to "record" a screenshot as a video or GIF.
• Added option to mark a post as read/unread in the post option's menu.
• Changed long tap on the header, expand button or the side to expand actions as well.
• Fixed a bug where links are invisible in conversations.

So Summit for Lemmy already supports "advanced screenshots" letting you take screenshots of posts and comments with ease, allowing you to include any and as many comments as you want. However this doesn't work as well if the post or comments have animated GIFs in them. I'm working on a feature that will allow you to take an "advanced screenshot" but as a GIF so you can capture any video or GIF as well.

Changes so far

• Added a feature to "record" a screenshot as a video or GIF.
• Fixed a bug where links are invisible in conversations.
• Changed long tap on the header, expand button or the side to expand actions as well.
• Added option to mark a post as read/unread in the post option's menu.

If I am reading the messages of my inbox, I get prompted with the post in collapsed state (A). If I want to visit the referred Reference I have to expand your Notification (ViewGroup B). At the bottom I am able to go to the comment posted.

Please add this Button (from bottom of (B)) to the left to the expand-Arrow on said view (state (A)) to avoid scrolling.

You should even be able to restrict the context of a scroll of such notification so that one can get the opened post scrolled to the clicked action (since you elected to context perfectly already). Though that may be inconsistent to clicking the name, instance or (not implemented) comment of the post.

It depends on the Context (when comparing A or B). If we are all PowerUsers, Implementation elected is obvious... Hard to document. Still requestiong a duplicate button bound in collapsed RecyclerView.ViewHolder :- )

I would be able to elect a suggestion more carefully if I could test it locally on my devices. I feel like you have engineered the most capable app. So thanks for this..

Hopefully you are not tracking my direct messages. Can't judge due to licensing ;).

For the Views of comments and posts you explicitly bound the [email protected] to its own onClickListener. You didn't implemented that within anything in our inbox. Therefore I ask you to bind the nested RecyclerView when opening a inbox message - as well as its message itself - to the same interactions.

Sincerly, a happy user.

Making this post to track progress on the next release. Will decide on a title later.

Changes so far:

• Fixed a bug where the navigation bar does not highlight the correct item in certain cases.
• Fixed a bug where the open link button is visible when no image is shown in the post list.
• Changed messages in the inbox. Messages sent by you will no longer show up in inbox.
• Fixed some bugs that occur when viewing a link to a Lemmy post of another instance.
• Make it more obvious when loading in the inbox screen(s)
• Changed the "Mark as read" gesture to toggle the read state of the post. Eg. if a post is read and the gesture "Mark as read" is performed, the post will be marked as unread.

Update

With how the release is going it's seeming very likely this release will focus on cleaning up the DM experience.

The current DM experience is pretty bad. Messages are littered everywhere and it's very difficult to follow a message chain. This wasn't high priority since it was assumed most users are not using DMs. However as other parts of the app becomes polished, DMs are suddenly the weakest part of the app.

The current minimum plan is to group DMs with individuals together into chains at the very least. Other improvements are still up in the air.

Unfortunately, designs of the DMs will probably be limited to what the Lemmy API can provide. For instance, I was exploring an email like approach where one item is shown per message thread however there is currently no API that returns only top level message threads. Instead you can only get individual messages. Of course we can still implement this on the client however it can lead to an excessive amount of network calls.

As an example, imagine a scenario where user A and B exchange a lot of message. Let's say they exchanged 1000 messages. Let's say the client is configured to fetch 50 messages at a time. Given this, if the user navigates to the messages screen the client will fetch 50 messages. The client will then group all 50 messages as a conversation between A and B. However since this is just one conversation, the client will need to fetch more messages to make sure there aren't any other conversations. This will repeat until all 1000 messages have been fetched. At this point the client is finally sure there are no other conversations and it will stop. This means that the client will need to make 20 network calls in order to load the messages screen which is pretty costly.

There are some solutions but they all vary in effort or usability. The easiest solution is to not collapse conversations in the messages screen. The downside here is usability as it would be difficult to look for specific conversations. The highest effort solution would be to group all messages on the messages screen and build a database on the client side that tracks all messages. By doing so, the first time messages are loaded might still be costly but subsequent refreshes should be relatively fast.

I'm still mulling over what to do here.

Update 2

I love you guys so I'm going to implement the best possible DM experience with no cut corners. It's going to take some time though.

This update focuses on general app improvements and bug fixes.

Full changelog

• Added new image loading animation.
• Improved styling on collapsed comments. Voting on a collapsed comment will update the score and cause the score color to change.
• Fixed many bugs with the layout "list with cards". Specifically it was missing the voting buttons and the comments counter. This has been added. Several other fixes has also been applied for this layout.
• Fixed a bug where the header text of a post would be cut off when using certain layouts.
• Fixed a bug where the link icon would appear on a post even if the post does not contain a link.
• Fixed a bug where paragraphs within a spoiler block may not be correctly formatted.
• Support subscripts in markdown (for~example~)
• Fixed a bug where opening. closing and opening the same post will cause the post to not be highlighted when the post is closed.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes you can drag a blank window from the right side of the screen.
• Fixed a bug where the progress bar when loading videos does not conform to the app theme.