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?
Infinity was my absolute favorite, I shall watch this app with great interest 😁 lemme (Lemmy?) know if you need any additional testers
Thanks!
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?
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.
It’s the age old “writing code is easier than reading code”
Oh absolutely this. Far far easier. It’s a sign of a good dev who can come in and improve things without needing to rewrite everything. That said, refactors are fun as hell.
Does it have a name?
It’s probably gonna be Beyond :)
Great to see more apps in the works. Do you plan on making the app open source?
Infinity was the only way I interacted with reddit. If you can get kbin support, I will be all over beta testing this
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.
Good for you, I enjoyed Infinity and am very excited for this client to succeed. Go Bruno Finger go!
Please start a sub for the app so we can subscribe to follow development and join a beta program when ready.
If you’re interested, I can put this in the stickied thread on !android@lemmy.ml
Thank you but not just yet :)
Looks good. I can’t wait to try it out. I’m liking Jerboa so far, but having more apps competing to be the best would be great.
I have been testing both !memmy@lemmy.ml and !mlemapp@lemmy.ml and both still have some bugs to work out, but they are progressing quickly. Memmy for instance had 2 updates just today, looking forward to seeing what comes out of testflight first.
The merrier the better.
My love of Infinity is what pushed me off the Reddit train so I’d be pumped to have a Fedv equivalent!
Community groups (Add communities to a group, see posts only from selected group)
That feature can’t come soon enough, not only in mobile apps but also on the website itself
Definitely. I miss multireddits. I’ve started to get around that by setting up an RSS feed for the first time in probably 10 years, but that just solves half of the equation- the content, but not the comments.
