Hi all, keeping this post short, I am working on a new Lemmy app for iOS and Android, heavily inspired on the Infinity for Reddit app.
The app is very much still a work in progress, but I’s like to share some screenshots and a few MVP functionalities already implemented:
Already implemented:
- Anonymous browsing;
- Login;
- Multiple accounts support;
- Account switcher;
- Post cards
- Sorting posts by Lemmy’s sorting options (Active/Hot/New/etc…);
- Listing posts by Lemmy’s listing options (Subscribed/Local/All);
- Upvote, downvote (and counters), comment counter, save;
- Mark post as read;
- Infinite post scrolling (keep on scrolling, app loads more posts in the background);
What’s next before I make it available in the app stores (MVP):
- Post view (see post’s comments);
- Add a comment to a post;
- Create a post;
- A sexier selected account card on the sidebar;
What’s still to do before I can call it a beta version:
- Profile view;
- Community view (rules mods other details);
- Search;
- Dark mode;
What’s to come after:
- Custom theming/Material You support;
- Advanced post filters;
- Community groups (Add communities to a group, see posts only from selected group);
- A video player with controls over speed playback and maybe quality if possible;
- Alternative posts view (compact card, list, etc)
- Other cool misc options.
Dreams:
- Kbin and Mastodon accounts support.
Keep an eye for future posts, I may be able to announce the MVP by the end of this week if everything goes well, but I can’t promise anything :)
EDIT:
This post got so much traction than I had predicted. Thank you so much for all your comments and ideas! I tried to reply to as many as I could.
I also collected from this post a bunch of good suggestions from you which for now I am keping track of here: https://brunofinger.notion.site/brunofinger/Beyond-45cabaae7f724cd5ad2b77d902e9a97e
The app name probably will be “Beyond” as suggested by a couple of users here, and really like this idea as it creates a sort of symbolic link to Infinity as the inspiration for my work by the famous “To Infinity and Beyond” phrase :)
If it’s inspired by Infinity, you should call it Beyond
I m glad you mentioned it! after I posted this on Tuesday night, I came up with the same idea! To Infinity, and Beyond!
this makes too much sense not to
I was 100% for Lemur, but Beyond is an excellent name. It’s slightly grandiose but vague. Like I always thought “Apollo” was a great name. It’s a cool word and it doesn’t really mean anything in the context.
Please, however you name this app, don’t call it “X for Lemmy”. Just call it Beyond. Or just Lemur, or whatever. I hate when all these devs triple the length of their app name by adding “for Reddit” or whatever at the end.
It could have a different name on the app store than the actuall app, ie. on Play Store Infinity is named “Infinity for Reddit”, but when instaled the app is named only “Infinity”, I was considering a similar aproach, what do you thinkl?
Post cards was the first thing I turned off in RIF. I don’t want a photo gallery, want a concise list of threads and maybe a small thumbnail at best. Thread title, domain of post’s link, how many comments and upvotes and the pertinent things to click, in as efficient a format as possible.
Do that and you can get like 10 posts per screen would makes browsing and scrolling very efficient.
Now, if you want to make it god-mode then add tabs at the top for queuing up stuff to peruse in detail.
This is the way. Cards are the bane of UI design.
Honestly I loved the card view because of the gallery, put focus on the post image.
Having that said, card won’t be the only layout available but it is the first I am working on.
Love, I use infinity and keep the style for lemmy will be a big upgrade. Also think about make the app FOSS and on FDroid.
honestly as of now I see no reason why not open sourcing it, I still didn’t upload the code anywhere yet but probably will chose gitlab
Love it, thank you very much for your work
expired
I love to call out awesome work in the ecosystem when I see it. If you’re interested in alternative communities to those on Reddit, then go check out @brunofin 's new #lemmy client for Android and iOS that he posted about over on https://beehaw.org/c/programming.
thanks for posting about it :)
Also, am I just missing it or is there no way to simultaneously boost a #fediverse post and add my own text to it on #mastodon?
Ugh, my apologies folks. Clearly still figuring out how to do this Lemmy/Mastodon federation thing.
Hey, what does the boost function do?
@Sophokles @brunofin , to answer my own question … #til boosts without extra comments are a thing for good reasons.
If you’re interested, I can put this in the stickied thread on !android@lemmy.ml
Please start a sub for the app so we can subscribe to follow development and join a beta program when ready.
Will it be open source like infinity?
I see no reason why not
This looks great, I’ll definitely be trying it once it’s out. It seems like you’ve got plenty of things to work on, but if I could suggest one extra thing that jerboa is missing, see if you can add the ability to swipe between posts while you’re in the comments. Sometimes I just want to swipe through every post in my feed instead of picking the posts I wanted to open
noted!
nice, is there any chance this will be uploaded onto f-droid?
I can definitely look into it
Could become super popular, good work!
Thank you for this.
Lemmy definitely needs more and better apps.
But just a curiosity question if you don’t mind. You said that your app is heavily inspired by Infinity which is already open source, so why not just fork that and modify it to work with Lemmy?
That’s honestly a good point but:
- Infinity is written in Java code specifically targeted to Android only, I am targeting both iOS and Android with the same code using React Native (maybe even web in the future but it’s a little more complicated due to CORS);
- I have worked with React for at least the past 4 years, so using React Native now for me feels like almost no learning curve at all, while if I’d be given a Java-based Android codebase now, I’d probably need to spend the first week figuring out the basics :)
I think swapping from one API to another is not just a drop in replacement; it might be easier to start fresh from the ground up.
Disclaimer: I am not a developer so I honestly don’t actually know
Am a developer, and there’s a few patterns to make this sort of thing easier, but Lemmy/kbin is pretty different than the reddit APIs as I understand it with the federation aspects, so swapping wouldn’t be THAT easy. Doable, but not a drop in replacement.
@brunofin Wow this is app #6 now that pops up, added yours to the list in my thread: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/35655/Several-iOS-apps-for-kbin-lemmy-are-now-in-development
could you please try and port this feature as well? there are Zero third party apps that load new posts on frontpage after refreshing, infinity is the only one which has it, and it works flawlessly. hope we get something similar for lemmy too
I’m super excited to see where this goes!
