Avelon App

I noticed that some kinds of posts are demphazied 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