Hey everyone! For more than a month now I’ve been working hard on the biggest update to Avelon so far. Today I’m really excited to announce that it’s finally out on the App Store! The update includes a whole bunch of cool new features for people who want that little extra and QOL improvements all-around.
Some of the highlights of this update include:
- Community groups
- App themes
- Right-edge swipe-to-go-forward gesture
- Custom app icons
- GIF/video scrubbing
- Advanced filtering tools, including keywords & instances
- Fixes to a bunch of iOS 17 related issues
- New markdown editor tools
- Smart comment jump button
- Ability to manage and clear app cache
- Support for Lemmy 0.19RC
- Lots of bug fixes & improvements all around
I really appreciate everyone who has helped with beta testing during the 1.0.6 cycle, you guys are honestly great!! It’s super motivating to hear so many people enjoying the app, and as always I’m open to suggestions and feedback. I hope you find the Pro-model I’ve landed on a fair/decent way to run the app. I’ve tried my best to consider all factors like affordability, development, as well as the quality & quantity of what Pro offers - and I hope I’ve found a good middle ground.
As for the future: for 1.0.7 I’m thinking I’m gonna focus primarily on performance, stability & bug fixes, but I’ll probably throw in some more QOL features as well. Just let me know if you’re missing anything or if you find any pesky bugs or nuisances. Hope you enjoy the update!
Edit: Seems to be a slight issue with upgrading to pro, working on it 😅
Edit: Fixed!
I totally support y’all having a pro mode, so I don’t want this to come across as me trashing on that in general. But I’m really disappointed to see the Content Filtering options behind a paywall. There are obviously a lot of people who are just going to use that to tailor things more to their preferences. But there’s also a lot of people who would use it to filter out posts that are harmful for them. I think you should reconsider making that a free option.
Hmm, good point. I've tried to focus the update on more "power user" stuff that's not strictly neccessary, but you're right that this could be the case. I'll think about it
I miss the jump comment button being gone now without a Pro account too
I definitely do have other opinions on what has been paywalled, but I think most of those are convenience features. However, content filtering is important for everyone so you can block harmful crap you don’t want to see. Especially being able to block harmful new instances before they get defederated.
Luckily in a few weeks we’ll all be able to block entire instances on our own.
Might be a server cost to have that feature. If main Lemmy might not have that option yet and they provide their own.
If there is, that would be a really bad implementation. There’s no reason that it couldn’t be done on-device. It’s literally just filtering the response from the Lemmy instance for certain keywords or instance urls. Think of all that a browser ad blocker is able to do to a webpage, completely locally.