cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11649661
Download Arctic on the AppStore!
I am thrilled to announce that Arctic is now available on the AppStore! Looking back, it’s amazing to see how much progress Arctic has made in the last six months. Initially, I began working on Arctic as a personal project to fill the void after leaving Reddit during the API fiasco. I had no intention of releasing it publicly. Now, I have a fully-featured Lemmy client, a fantastic group of beta testers on TestFlight, and an official release on the AppStore.
However, the journey isn’t over yet. I have many exciting plans for Arctic, and this is just a significant milestone. Going forward, I plan to release more targeted updates on TestFlight and create a public roadmap for AppStore releases.
I would like to thank everyone who was involved with Arctic’s TestFlight for all the valuable feedback and suggestions that have helped shape Arctic!
Links
- Website: getarctic.app
- TestFlight: testflight.apple.com
- AppStore: apps.apple.com
- Issues: github.com
- Community: !arctic@lemmy.world
I really like the app. I love the default account on startup. The one thing is I’m. Or a huge fan of the logo on the splash screen. The icon I changed to the blacked out one.
Glad you like it!
I’m also not satisfied with the icon, though I am not a graphic designer and I’ve been struggling to make a better icon/logo. I’m hoping by the next release I can either find a graphic designer to assist, or come up with an improved logo on my own.
You could also try a community contest? Just an idea.
I had the same thought, unfortunately the arctic community is not very big at the moment, so I’ve been waiting to grow it a bit before doing that.
I’ve been thinking about this logo thing over night. The Lights out icon you made for the app as actually super powerful! 3 dots, 2 sets of whiskers and you get immediately what it is. It’s ultra simple and yet easy to identify. You could make your main logo from that. Doing variations on colors and so on. You. An even reduce or even more to 3 dots in that triangular pattern, it doesn’t need to be representing an animal, your app is called Arctic, after all, which doesn’t have to be connected to the rodent image to work. You already have a strong logo!
Just a quick on the phone color swap
I like the idea. I feel that it would need a bit more to be used as branding for Arctic. The three dots on their own are not all that recognizable. I think they need a bit more to offer context as to what they represent, and to fill the blank space between. I am definitely a fan of the simplicity, and abstract idea though.
I may play around with that and see what I can come 7p with.
I am a media designer, but not a specialized artist or illustrator. However, I could try to create an icon, even if it does not end up being used.
Yeah, I’d love to see what you could come up with. Even if it didn’t make the cut for a new default icon, I could add it as an alt icon.
Thanks! Giving it a shot!
Congrats! The best app for embedded videos and gifs I’ve used so far! I’m using the beta but having this as an official release now is good news!
Thank you! Embedded content has been a top priority for Arctic since day one. Hopefully soon I’ll have in-line embedding working for markdown so content can be embedded directly in markdown rather than appended below it.
Very nice. So far works really well on iPad.
I’m trying it on an iPhone, and likening it very much! Strong work! Thanks!
Thank you, I’m glad you like it.
One of the upcoming releases is going to be purely focused on improving the iPad support. I added the initial support for iPad layouts a few months ago, and I have a lot of ideas on how to improve it, I’ve just not found the time yet to work on it.
That sounds great!
I often use my iPad with stage manager, and a lot of the lemmy apps have issues with that. So far, this app hasn’t shown any issues I’ve noticed, so I’m really happy with that.
This feels like the most native app I’ve tried so far. It’s great!
Yeah, I made it a point to add support for split view and slide-over in the initial iPad support, by extension I believe that allows using stage manager. I am planning to add support for a context aware sidebar so it shows a sidebar relevant to the tab you are viewing. Also I want to support multiple windows so you can use multiple accounts side by side. I have a lot of other ideas I’d like to implement as well.
Unfortunately I don’t have an iPad that supports new iOS firmwares, so testing is tedious. Nonetheless, I’ll be working on this soon.
All that sounds great! I’m excited to see it all when it launches.
For an initial iPad offering, again, it feels really good. And even giant companies like Google are over here with garbage iPad apps like YouTube that can’t handle stage manager well. So bravo.
Noice. Definitely the best Lemmy client I’ve used since Remmel stopped working.
I haven’t tried Remmel before, did it stop working since Lemmy updated to 0.19? Either way, I’m glad your liking Arctic! Let me know if you have any issues or suggestions.
Great - does it support auto-reader on links?
Yes it does, but I see you’ve already found that setting.
It does! Maybe I can finally ditch Memmy. Even if memmy’s got some bugs it’s best of the rest for me - as nobody else supports auto-reader mode
What’s auto-reader?
Auto-reader is for opening links in the browser in reader mode, where only the text is shown in a nice readable format. It’s great for some of the horribly formatted sites with ads between every paragraph.
That is very cool!
Is there a way to hide the voting arrows? I always swipe my votes. Additionally, can just show the current vote total? I know it might be unfashionable, but the total is sufficient for me.
That’s funny, I actually spent last night working on both of these ideas. The next release will allow hiding voting arrows and showing combined votes (score) in place of upvote/downvote counts.
Sweet! Thanks so much. Everything else seems amazing and I’m looking forward to those new features.
Congrats! 🎉
I’m curious about the import/export settings function…
Would that allow me to export my list of subscriptions from one Lemmy account and import it into another?
Yes, this is a feature that was added to Lemmy recently in v0.19. Basically it allows you to export all your subscriptions, blocked communities, blocked instances, saved posts, saved comments, and account settings such as display name, bio, avatar, etc. It was added to offer support for migrating your account from one instance to another.
I just added support for this feature a couple of days ago, before that I had an option to import/export just your subscriptions, which I replaced with this.
In the next release I will add support for importing selected fields. So basically you’ll be able to export your settings from one instance, and when importing on another, you can select what you want to import, for instance if you only want to import subscriptions, and blocks, you can disable the rest of the fields.
Wow, that is an excellent feature, and sounds like a really good plan for implementation.
When importing to an account, does it merge with existing data in the account (subscriptions, saved posts, etc) or does it replace?
Yeah, that’s where the idea came from was I noticed while testing that the data was merged instead of replaced. For settings such as name and bio, etc, it is replaced, but lists like subscriptions, are merged.
deleted by creator
“full-featured” -> no mod tools
tired of this dance with lemmy apps
Arctic supports all available mod actions, and also has a mod-zone in the sidebar. I do need to work on improving them, but the support is there.
[edit] it also supports push notifications for reports and applications.
oh i didn’t think to look in the communities list, sorry. my mod queue is empty currently, how does the app show you there’s an unhandled report? I’d kind of expect them to show up in inbox tab, but it seems i have to go through the posts tab -> community list -> mod zone dance to get to them? is there a notification count on the posts tab too for reports to hint to me that there’s something there?
Also it might be nice to mention mod tools in the app description because most lemmy apps are still lacking them.
No problem at all. This is exactly the kind of feedback in need. I have a few moderators in the TestFlight that have given really helpful feedback, but I only moderator the Arctic community which doesn’t require much interaction. I definitely like the idea of moving the mod-zone to the inbox tab as that is a way more appropriate spot for it, and I will have it update the inbox unread badge as well.
If you want to join the TestFlight I could probably have these suggestions added in the next day or two.
i’ve had the testflight build since early on, but haven’t paid much attention to this app because i can’t get the post-list ui to look the way i prefer in other apps. 😅
my community doesn’t need much moderation either, which means if i don’t check the website often enough i’ll completely miss a few reports because there haven’t been any in a month and my instance admin has to be annoyed by them.
That’s fare, I’m currently working on an update to add more customization options to the post feed cells, and improve the layout of compact styles. If you have any suggestions I’m happy hear them.
That’s a good point, I just really hadn’t received the feedback I needed to improve the mod tools ui until now. Thanks for the suggestions!
Wondering, how hard would it be to implement the ability to adjust post title font to be larger/smaller than post body font on the feed?
This would be quite simple to add. The issue I have with it is that most of the app is heavily text based, and it would be difficult to add font sizing support for individual locations.
What I have thought about was font settings for different font styles. All of the fonts in Arctic follow The iOS design guidelines, so it would be fairly easy to add options to customize the size of the 8 different font sizes used in arctic.
In the mean time, as that may take some time to implement, I might add an option for increase headline size for enlarging just headline text.
I’m confused by your comment. Arctic has mod tools.
