Avelon App

Looks like full radio silence, and even the IAP links in the app have started to die. Looks like evgiz has moved on to other projects as well based on their twitter. I'll be over on Voyager.

I do hope @evgiz@lemm.ee is alright.

How’s this app nowadays? Still usable and in development?

Community seems not really alive unfortunately, saw the last post was from 2 months ago.

I accidentally blocked a community when viewing a post. Is there a way to undo this in the app or a way online?

So when I try gif scrubbing, it says I need to upgrade to Pro. Okay, but in settings there are only options for donating to the developer now, and there is no Pro upgrade anymore. So what’s going on here? Is the Pro option going away? If I donate, will I get Pro features? Does the interface just need to catch up with new monetization model? I’m confused.

Looks like every post from Reddit images and redgif are broken and don’t load any more

I’m using the iPad app in my Vision Pro and I can log in, but all the feeds just error out

I switched over to the app last night and noticed that my subscription list is empty. The Home screen shows my subscription posts correctly but the actual list of them is never populated even after force closing the app and reopening.

In October, a new sorting mode was introduced: „scaled“

This allows sorting posts based on the size of the community in order to avoid the feed being dominated by large, active communities, and pushing smaller communities. This was one of the main blockers for me to move from Reddit, so I’m glad it’s finally implemented. Therefore, I would love to see this sort option be available in Avelon on supported instances.

Thanks!

This happens both on a feed as well as within a thread.

Happens both on my direct instance as well as on a random instance out there.

I go to scroll, and there is a nearly one-second pause before the screen jumps to where I have scrolled. If I start very slowly, there is no pause, but I am talking about an unreasonably slow start to the scroll.

Working with an iPhone 15 Pro Max, hardware limitations should not be in play here.

Working with the latest version of Avalon.

Curious if I am the only one.

The apps seems to crash every 30 minutes of scrolling. The whole phone is then laggy for a few minutes. It looks like there is a memory leak.

When I bring up an image by itself, I can do a long press on the image and get the app Safari drop-down interface (see attached), which gives me (along with other tools) the option to download the image to my camera roll or to copy the image for pasting elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the Avelon app blocks this action entirely.

If there is a workaround, it gives no indication as to what it is, forcing the user to thrash around and discover the box with the out/up arrow in the lower right.

If there is a way to whitelist this behaviour, there is also no way to inform the user on what setting they need to adjust.

At any rate, this is a noticeably frustrating suboptimal UI/UX, and should be addressed.

Came across an issue with this post: https://lemmy.ml/post/9922111

When viewed in browser it’s a scene from Star Trek about beards, when viewed in Avelon though it’s a video of chinchilla’s dancing and waving their butts about.

Happens each time the post loads, in both the main feed and the post view itself.

With most instances updated to 19.0 and Avelon supporting it, when will we be able to use the new Scaled and Controversial sorting methods?

Hey all, I’ve been unable to log into the app with this lemmynsfw.com account for the past week or so. Every time I try, I get the following message:

!

I had issues with downvotes always erroring for about a week before that - not sure if it’s related. My other account works normally.

Anybody else having similar issues?

When trying to add a new guest instance it opens the window to type it and it quickly disappears.

On a side note, what’s going on with the development? It’s the longest we’ve had without a new update and (at least for me) Avelon has become a little laggy, not to mention 0.19 is just a few days away.

Hope everything is okay with evgiz.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/7163222

Hi everyone,

For the past weeks I've been working hard on a push notification service for Avelon that is finally ready for open beta! This feature involves a completely new cloud service that automatically notifies you whenever someone replies to your posts/comments, and it simultaneously supports multiple accounts you might have. Although the app itself doesn't change much with this new Testflight build, there's a lot of stuff happening in the background to make push notifications happen.

My goal with the open beta is to test the service with many more users to see how it scales under heavier load. I'm not sure how powerful of a server it'll need - and as many of you might know cloud compute isn't exactly cheap. The service isn't quite done yet, so while I keep working on it you should expect downtime and occasionally delayed notifications.

How to join

• Download the latest 1.0.8 testflight build
• Open Avelon and go to Settings/Notifications
• Enable notifications for the accounts you wanna use

When you're testing, I'm especially interested in verifying that you're not getting any duplicate notifications and that you're receiving notifications for all the accounts you've enabled. Also, please share any bugs you might find or thoughts about how to improve things!

Notifications should still work if you go back to the App Store version without deleting the app, but notifications won't open the post and the notification badge will probably not behave properly. This is just a result of the previous version not supporting notifications yet, and will ofc be resolved with the official release!

Technical stuff for those interested

The push notification service is written in Rust, which is a pretty awesome language. This is my first time using it for a complete solution, but I must say I'm already sold on the features the language offers. Ensuring performance and security was a breeze compared to many other languages I've used. For those unaware, Lemmy itself is also written in Rust.

I've prioritized making sure the service scales well with many users, whilst not being heavier than necessary on the Lemmy servers. All traffic from the Avelon service is properly tagged to make it easy for instance owners to verify that the traffic is legit, and not some kind of DOS attack. If the traffic turns out to be a bit heavy for any instance owners, please don't hesitate to contact me to discuss how I can tweak the service to be less demanding on your server.

With the addition of push notifications I'll also update the privacy badge on the App Store to include (opt-in) collection of device identifiers. This is just a practical necessity to know which device to send notifications to. Apple continuously shuffles these random IDs, and they are the only ones who know who each one belongs to. The Avelon service simply sends a notification with the ID to Apple, and they figure out which device to forward it to. And of course, if you disable push notifications in the app all your info is immediately deleted from the notification server.

Thanks for reading & helping me test!

Thank you for Avelon!

Requesting an option to show the submitting user (submitter) in the Feed views, especially the Compact Post view.

I got used to this feature back in the Apollo days. Seeing the submitter gives more info on whether to open/view a post (i.e. is the poster a known bot? known troll? known spammer? have they posted previous un- or likeable content?)

Thank you for your consideration!

Sometimes I click a comment or swipe in from the right to collapse it, I want to reopen but it is very difficult to click on only the collapsed comment and not the commenter’s name.

Would it be possible to make swipe from the right to …uncollapse (expand?) the comment again. It’s one of those little things that would really improve the flow of reading through comments.

On a completely unrelated note, the saved draft for posts is very helpful. I would normally have to cut the text, go back to whatever, and then paste it back.

Hello,

Is Avelon pro upgrade family shareable? If not, would it perchance be possible to introduce a family pro option at a higher price?

According to Apple documentation, family sharing can be enabled on individual IAPs.

Thanks.

In a community feed, nbsp characters are escaped instead of rendered.

Hi!

We all try to make the lemmy fediverse active by posting interesting content! It's currently painful to share a picture I just took. I would love to share it easily.

Currently :

• I take a picture
• I select "share..." in the iOS menu
• I send it to myself as an email to resize it (otherwise it will be rejected because it's too heavy)
• I save the picture in my photos
• I launch a lemmy app
• I go to the right community
• I create a new post
• I browse the photo library to get the picture

What I would love :

• I take a picture
• I select "share..." in the iOS menu, I find a lemmy app
• I am ready to select the community
• (The lemmy app resizes the picture for me)

I know that it is not an easy feature to implement. However, the lemmy fediverse would gain activity from it.

Also : it's less painful, but sharing an URL directly from the browser would also be a must.

Hi everyone,

First of all, thanks so much for everyone using Avelon and everyone who've decided to support the development by upgrading, it really means a lot! All the feedback in the post following the release of pro was definitely insightful. If you're unaware, I recommend reading the post as well as my reply here.

I've decided to push towards a 1.0.7 release a bit earlier than planned to address everyone's feedback. My goal with these changes is to provide a wider range of features in a more basic free variant, whilst offering more extensive customization options and an even better experience as an optional upgrade. This way everyone gets to try out more stuff for free, and if you want the full capabilities you can feel confident that the features work as you'd expect. This setup is more in line with other apps as well as the feedback from all of you.

In addition to tweaks to the free tier, the update contains a new text selection tool, a new dark theme, the ability to lock the app with FaceID, more filtering options + lots of QOL improvements and bug fixes.

Full Changelog

Adjustments to the free/pro tiers

• Added a basic jump button to the free version
  • The smart jump button with extra settings and customisation remains pro
• Everyone now has access to a limited number of custom filters for free
  • The pro version includes unlimited filters and new filtering options
• The maximum number of profiles in the free tier is now three (guest + 2 custom accounts)
  • This change does not affect any accounts you've already added
  • The pro version has unlimited accounts
• Added a free 7 day trial option to enable everyone test out the pro features
• Added various descriptions to pro settings to more clearly explain what they do
• Replaced the groups “pro” tag in subscriptions with a link to a more details about the feature

New pro features

• Added ability to lock the app with FaceID
• Added new dark theme ‘Hacker man’
• Added option to place the smart jump button anywhere, not just around the edges
• Added ability to filter independently on either the post title or post body

New features, QOL improvements and bug fixes

• Added tool to select text from comments & posts
• Added ability to delete your own posts
• Added share option to links and comments
• Improved prioritizations for swipe gestures
  • This should prevent accidental downvotes when you’re trying to swipe back!
• Fixed issue where editing markdown links would sometimes show weird characters and symbols
• Limited the maximum number of smart link previews in posts
  • This should keep “link aggregation” posts from being unnecessarily long
• Fixed issue where adding accounts would sometimes fail
• Fixed issue where swipe-to-go-forward could sometimes break after tapping the navbar to go back
• Removed option to report/block yourself
• Lots of minor bug fixes and improvements