Remote View

2y ago

Avelon for Lemmy is now on the App Store!

‎With Avelon you can explore every topic, navigate seamlessly using customizable gestures, and tailor the look of the app to your preferences. Engage in diverse conversations and discover the content you care about. Key Features - Sleek design that fits right in on iOS - Support for videos, gifs, ...

Hi everyone!

It's been quite the journey, but Avelon is finally on the App Store!

Click here to download!

The app is includes a lot of awesome features requested by the community, including:

Sleek design that fits right in on iOS & iPadOS
Highly customizable look & behavior
Mark read on scroll & hide read posts
Customizable swipe gestures
Multiple account support
Smart link previews in posts and comments
Support for videos, gifs, photos & other media
Custom font support
Write replies with markdown highlighting
Privacy focused - the app has no tracking of any kind
Gallery mode + hide bars on scroll = full immersion ... and a lot more!

Screenshots

Here's some cool app store screenshots of the app:

Developing this app has been one of the best development experiences I've had, and I feel very privileged and happy to have been able to contribute to Lemmy in this way. Nothing is more motivating than seeing so many people already enjoying the app and providing suggestions and feedback.

I really hope you enjoy Avelon, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about what everyone thinks. Keep the feedback coming!

Thank you, Sigve Rokenes

50 comments

Big Congratulations evgiz,
I’m sure the love and fan base for Avelon will only grow from here on just the way we loved it here in TestFlight..
I wish you all the success and growth with Avelon development.
Thanks and really happy for you.
- Well said. +1. Thank you for Avelon!

Congrats! I had Avelon from the start and I must say, what a journey it has been! You are one of the most responsive dev that I ever had the pleasure of interacting with.
The app keeps getting better and better, congratulations! And I can’t wait to see where you’re going with the app.
- Thank you! I've got some pretty big new features in the works, and I expect I'll get even more suggestions to look at now that more people get the chance to try it out!

This is an amazing app, and such a better experience and UI than I was seeing in other Lemmy apps. I’m curious if you knew that opening the app kills playing audio (music or podcasts)? Autoplayed videos & GIFs are muted by default already, so I’m confused why my already playing audio is stopped on app load? Edit: I should mention that this does not occur if the view setting is “compact”. I do t generally use that setting, but I wanted you to know.

The app is not bad. The browser needs reader mode. Give the choice to make it all black.
- Looking at adding reader mode for the next version!
  
  I hope you can keep reader mode with the browser you’ve used. I love the done/close button being in the bottom!

Installed and set it up and it’s a very nice and impressive app! Will jump between voyager, memmy, and this to see which one I stick with.

Does the app supports sharing (stream of) comments as pictures?
- Nope, you'll have to take a screenshot for now. It's a pretty cool feature tho, I'll look into it

Any reason for not using SFSafariViewController over the custom UI?
- Not really, just liked the option to customize more. Probably switching over for the next version tho since the current one doesn't support reader mode among other things.
  
  That's great to hear! I've been using a lot of different Lemmy apps lately as a lot have come out and I really enjoy this one. Good work so far. But this so far is one of the bigger annoyances. The reason being that SFSafariViewController allows Safari's enabled content blockers to work. The current web view does not and it's something I haven't been used to for a good while (browsing without some form of ad / annoyance blocking).

Love the app. Two questions.
I feel like I’m missing something obvious, but how do I create a new post? I can reply easily but when I’m in a community I don’t see any way to create a new post. I assume I’m missing something obvious.
Second, the full page swipe is fantastic and something I love from Apollo. Would it be possible to support swiping the other way also? In other word, I open a post, accidentally swipe right, but then I could swipe left to go back exactly where I was. Another thing Apollo did so well.
Thanks for an awesome app.
- Thank you!
  Adding posts in not supported yet unfortunately. It's a bit tricky to make a nice UI for that on mobile, but I'm working on it.
  Love full width swipe back myself. I'd love to add the "forward again" swipe too, but it's a quite a bit more complex to do. I'll probably look at it eventually, but gonna focus on some other things first.
  Let me know if you have any more feedback!
  
  Sounds good. I just thought I was missing something obvious. Thanks again for all the hard work!

I’m really digging this app. Very well done and well made.
Would it be possible to get a sort by top 6 hours? I know that was never a standard for Reddit, but I’ve found it a valuable tool for browsing Lemmy.
- Already supported, just disabled by default. Go to Settings/General/Sorting and enable "Show Additional Options"!
  
  Amazing! Thank you for that!
  
  May I suggest having the fuller option being the default and allowing the user to remove sort options they don’t use?

I switched from Memmy a couple weeks ago and before that was a long-time Apollo for Reddit user. I have moved over just now from the TestFlight and couldn’t be happier. Thanks and congratulations on the official app!
I do note that the app doesn’t seem to remember the placement of the thumbnails, it resets back to the left after closing. Not a biggie though.
- Awesome. That's weird, I'll take a look. Let me know if you have any other feedback!

Awesome! Will the TestFlight version stay active or should we all migrate towards the AppStore version?
- I'll still use testflight before App Store releases, hope to get the initial v1.0.4 up there next week. If you wanna test things earlier and you're comfortable with a few more bugs then testflight is the place to be! The test version is a tiny bit outdated atm, but just for a few days

Thanks for this app, I really love the clean UI and responsiveness, also the features like individual hide read post settings.

Is this a native Swift app?
- Yeah!
  
  This is actually awesome. Other apps with that amount of features and polishness, like Bean, are ReactNative apps.

Also, just wondering if you have any thoughts on adding support, or creating an Avelon for kbin when the API goes public?
- Haven't looked much at the kbin api yet. Whether Avelon will support it greatly depends on how good the api is and how difficult it will be to maintain it in parallel with Lemmy
  
  Thanks for the reply!

awesome, just upgraded. is there a way to turn off haptic feedback?
- Not right now, good suggestion. Will add in next build!

It would be nice to be able to view pictures in landscape mode, sometimes portrait is too small on a phone. Loving the app!

Will there be an Android version?
- It's a native iOS app so unfortunately not possible
  
  Fair enough, gl though!

Is this opensource? (Does the fruitstore allow that?)
- Apple's Appstore doesn't forbid Open-Source or FOSS apps.
  If that were the case, Signal for iOS wouldn't exist :P

Fantastic app. Thanks for this. Been using lemmy more since this app.

This app went from I hate the icon and won’t even look at it to moving on my homepage with this last update. Community grouping was the one thing that I’ve been chasing and Bean ad implemented it but not in a clean way. Avelon came second but did it right! Also the new app icons are so much nicer than the default. Last thing it needs is push notifications.
Also, the paid plan feels like it’s very intrusive in the regular use of the app in free mode and gets frustrating. Maybe let some functions available to free users to get them to stay instead of pay walling all the good stuff. Or give a 7 day trial or something.

The search bar shifts when scrolling under explore. Can you lock it at the top or even better at the bottom for one handed use? 😉👌

This app is beautiful.
Thanks.

Are you planning to have a feature to expand video and gifs to full screen? I had to switch to other apps for this feature at the moment.

50 comments