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!
Would it possible to have a demo and/or explanation as to how the Community Groups work? I’d be interested in that, but was sort of burned by my own expectations of Bean’s version of the feature not living up to reality.
Maybe someway for us to see how the Pro features work, to help push us over the edge of buying/subscribing.
Good idea! I'll look at adding a free trial or other demo functionality.
Community groups let you add any number og communities (from any instance) into a named group that appears with your subscriptions on the "posts" tab. When you open it the feed works the same as usual, but will contain a mix of posts from the selected communities. The mix is designed to be even, so if one of the communities is much smaller you'll still see posts from that one too. You can sort as usual, but the mix will try to remain even as long as there are enough posts to pick from.
What was the issue with Bean's implementation?
Sweet, a free trial might be enough too!
My issue with Bean’s version is that it takes the different communities, but stacks the posts from each. Basically taking the top 10 posts from community 1, then appends top 10 posts from community 2, and so on. I feel it would be more useful to have all the posts (and even if it’s just 10) from each community and then sort. So they’re mixed together and you don’t have to scroll a lot to see “all” the relevant posts in the group.
And I’m not trying to be critical of you or Bean’s dev. Just sharing my opinion.
No worries, feedback is great. Avelon does basically the opposite of that, where it tries to interwine as much as possible (without being too heavy on the servers). Here's an example:
Oh sweet! Thanks for all the prompt replies!