Introducing Surfboard for Tildes
Hello, Tildes
Allow me to introduce myself.
I came over to Tildes fairly recently after Twitterriffic died and Apollo announced it would shut down.
As a relative youngster, I tend to mostly browse on mobile.
While I do appreciate Tildes' philosophy of having a simple website that works well on desktop and mobile, I've always preferred mobile apps. I'm a strong believer that a well-built native application will always provide a richer experience than a website.
But enough talking.. showing is way more fun - here's a lil' something I've been messing around with:
Introducing Surfboard for Tildes
The goal is simple: to be the best way to interact with Tildes on mobile.
Features
Surfboard is still extremely early, and is missing many features.
With that said, here is what it currently supports:
- Login to Tildes (supports 2FA)
- Browse topics
- Filters & sorting
- Browse comments
- Advanced rendering is still in early stages..
- Supports comment collapsing behavior from the web version
- Reply/vote/bookmark/ignore on topics, comments, & notifications (requires login)
- Search topics
- Global search
- Search within groups
- Option for in-line images
- Clean browsing interface
- In-line markdown preview when composing replies
- Share topics & comments
- Notifications
- View read & unread notifications
- Reply, vote, bookmark, mark as read...
- Customizable
- Toggle settings, set custom gesture actions, etc.
- Free, as in beer
The design draws some inspiration from Apollo for Reddit, an app that I loved & am very sad will be discontinued.
Try it yourself
I would love to get some feedback from other Tildes users on the app. If you are interested in trying it for yourself, you can get it here via TestFlight
Surfboard is built for iPhone, and requires iOS 16.0 or higher.
Inside the app is a 'roadmap' of sorts which is basically a list of things I know are missing, but if there's something you want that isn't listed there, I'm all ears.
Formatting is a little rough at the moment, although I made enormous improvements on the parsing & rendering there over the last day.
It should support just about anything you throw at it other than a <details>
(I'll get around to them, I swear..)
If you run into issues viewing a post/comment, you can easily open them in an in-app safari window from the menu.
As mentioned above, it's very early, but it's already becoming my favorite way to browse Tildes. I hope that others will enjoy it as well. Consider it my gift to the Tildes community.
Cheers !
Edit:
The best way to submit feature requests & bug reports is to add it to the issue tracker and/or leave a comment on this thread and I’ll get around to adding it myself.
Thanks !
Reposting a comment I made regarding wababa's app, since I think I noticed the same issue in yours:
p.s. Your app looks super slick though. I can't wait to try it!
I’ve moved it in the latest build.
Thank you everyone for the feedback !
You rock! Thanks for being so receptive to the suggestion. :)
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I definitely don’t want to step on the toes of the philosophy at all. (I actually requested an invite specifically because of what I read about Tildes’ philosophy in the docs)
I am a bit curious if that is the common opinion. In some threads such as this one and even the one you linked, I see a fair amount of people saying they dislike that part.
Personally, I don’t mind it much - I’m more of a lurker 😄
If I do move it, it’ll require a bit of thinking since I don’t think I’d want to move all the other post actions.
So, it’s
absolutely not a noa yes, but I do have to think about it a bit. Thanks for bringing it up.AFAICT, the vast majority of those complaints come from brand new users. And I think that complaint is typically just a bit of a kneejerk reaction that many new users have (we see it every invite wave) before they take time to really think about it. And if you do really stop to think about it, what are the benefits of having it at the top? Sure, it's more convenient, but it also greatly decreases the odds of your new top-level comment actually ever being read or replied to, because of the excessive amount of top-level comments and low-effort noise having it there encourages.
Whereas with it being at the bottom, if you really want to make a new top-level comment you still can, but the longer the comments section the more you have to scroll down, which increases the odds that only someone who truly feels they have a meaningful contribution to make will put that effort in, and so greatly decreases the noise. So IMO it's a win, win for everyone... except for people who hate being slightly inconvenienced, and dislike reading other top-level comments before making one of their own.
Thanks for the insight from someone who’s been around longer :)
It makes my UI easier to design 😆
I jest; I’ll start to think about it when I work on the project again.
Rather than having to scroll up and down to review the thread to respond to multiple points, one option/compromise might be to have a split panel w/ the top level reply edit field at the bottom that becomes available to expand/collapse once the reader has scrolled to the bottom, but still allowing the user to scroll through the entire thread and refer to or copy from multiple comments in the thread text while responding. For particularly long threads it might be nice to have a shortcut/gesture to scroll to the bottom. When the edit field is visible, it would be nice to be able to quickly insert a quote and user reference for individual comments in the thread into the edit field at the line just below the current cursor position.
Do you mean something like this ? Not sure I fully understood.
Yes, but with the top view able to scroll the entire thread and copy from any comment in the thread. Basically, the reader view. Most apps only let you see the single comment that you're responding so, but sometimes I want to reply and say something like "I think that you've misunderstood the person that you're responding to, they said X, which I interpret to mean this...", or "you've missed the context, the person you are responding to was responding to a higher level comment that says..."
Got it. I’ll look into adding an option to ‘pin’ the reply field at the bottom so you can scroll the rest of the post while keeping it fixed. You can leave a comment here if you want to add some more details.
Thanks for the feedback 👍
Yeah, I understand there are drawbacks to it as well, but there are ways to address those issues without compromising the benefits of it being at the bottom. E.g. Add a way for users to more easily reference the topic text while making a new top-level comment
Yeah I actually already have a preview of the post / comment being replied to at the top of the comment box for this very reason. I think that doing something similar on the website would solve any issues with the button being at the bottom of the page.
If there was a button on the site to collapse all comments (including top level comments) then the post and comment field would be close to each other.
If there was a button to collapse all comments that would defeat the purpose of the comment box being at the bottom though, since people would then be able to more easily ignore every other top-level comment before making a new one of their own. ;)
Add a 1 minute js countdown before the comment box unlocks
*cackles*
You're evil. I like the way you think! :P
Yeah, I mean ultimately we can't force people to read the other comments first, or ever totally prevent them from just jumping straight to the bottom of the page. But there is no sense in making it easier for everyone either, since a tiny bit of friction often goes a long way. Creating a "Collapse All" feature would basically be tacit approval of the behavior as well, which is why there is also not a dedicated "Jump to Bottom" button in the site UI either.
Meta: Funny how there are a bunch of comments saying similar things as a reply to parent, in this thread. Maybe the new-comment-reply box should be moved to the bottom of sibling comments for replies to comments too?
However, I know it'd become visually confusing in that situation though, so mostly just musing here.
Edit: Looking at timestamps, the more likely explanation is that people loaded the page at the same time, composed and posted their comments without reloading the page first and seeing a similar comment posted. A solution to that problem would be to offer to reload sibling comments before posting your own comment.
This is an interesting problem that I hadn't thought about before. Especially here on Tildes, where the standard of commenting is typically a bit higher than say, reddit, it could become an issue on more popular threads. I know I usually open a bunch of tabs then go through them all, so by the time I get to a thread it might be quite a while since I loaded the comments.
Your proposed solution sounds like a decent way to mitigate the issue too. @Deimos, is this something that (a) is even a real problem, and (b) would be possible to implement?
I don't know if it's too much of a problem overall, but it might be worth doing something to help it. There's already a similar kind of check being done when someone's editing the tags on a topic, to make sure that multiple different people don't edit them at the same time and inadvertently overwrite each other's changes.
I would call myself such a new user besides supporting tildes for years, but I have gotten active only recently.
I always thought it was weird that the comment box was at the bottom, but my opinion changed when I saw the post mentioned by OP and saw the reason behind it. I support the box being at the bottom now.
Example: in that thread about mobile browser where everyone offer suggestions. If the comment box were at the top, people would not go through the thread to add their upvotes and elaborate on others' suggestions.
I scrolled through comments until I found somebody else mentioning Vivaldi. If there were a top comment field, I may have just posted a new comment about Vivaldi and missed that whole comment thread.
I think what really removes the desire for it is discovering the "collapse old replies" option.
I‘ve probably argued that point 5 years ago already. But I think one important factor is that it‘s just where people are used to find the button. As a new user I just assumed the thread was locked at first.
I think this can be solved by keeping the response button at the top, but instead of letting the user reply, maybe give them a short info on the philosophy and tell them to find the real response button at the bottom.
This would keep the barrier of entry lower for new members
Edit: Oh, I think I misunderstood what you were saying. You meant just having info at the top mentioning the comment box is at the bottom? That might not be such a bad idea. Although again, a user only needs to learn it's at the bottom once, so having that info at the top of every single comment section feels a bit redundant. So I still think better onboarding is perhaps the best way to go about it.
I unfortunately don't think that will be enough to discourage the sort of behavior we're trying to discourage, since having it at the top will be a constant temptation to use it without actually reading any other comments first, and many users will simply ignore any warning message we add to it. A better onboarding process (e.g. like having Bauke's Tildes Shepherd built into the site) is probably the better way to help clear up any confusion for new users, especially since once people actually know it's down there they won't ever be confused about it again.
Yes that's what I meant. I figured once with a "don't show this again" could work - then you can remove the response button. It's just a UX feature I thought of. Of course I didn't test it myself.
But you're right. A short onboarding could also work. From all the users of my apps, I just realized that people don't read and go with their habits.
Simple and obvious one: you may get users who read comments before commenting. You may also get users who are frustrated and confused on where the comment button is and then never comment. It adds fricton, and friction for a new site attempting to achieve a network effect may as well be kryptonite.
There is also the issue of scale. Can you imagine trying to scroll to the bottom of r/news everytime you want to comment? You'd either spend a lot of time scroll or a lot more time reading and never commenting.
That said, I'm not sure how much Tildes cares about all of that given that it is 6 years old now and relatively small. But I understand why other sites design differently.
Sure. You know what else gets around this? The End key on a keyboard. still one button press (or maybe 2/3 depending on how compact your keyboard is).
But, as you note, Tildes has been around for over half a decade already. It isn't necessarily trying to achieve a network effect. It's trying to provide a platform for high-quality content and discussions. The friction from putting the comment box at the bottom of the page is explicitly part of achieving that goal.
That is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. If the design encourages people to read the other comments before commenting themselves, they're less likely to add redundant discussion. They're also encouraged to reply to existing comments as they read, fostering more actual engagement with other people.
And if the person gives up before getting to the bottom to comment, that's a sign that most other people will probably give up reading before they get to the person's new comment near the bottom of the page. So it's again a discouragement from adding comments that are unlikely to contribute to community discussion.
Of course. And I resonate with Tildes' goal. But I'm sure you and I have seen the downside of this approach. There would be times where there may be no new posts for days outside of the most popular groups (which I am not personally a part of) and while we can invite other users, it ultimately felt like the site could die the minute Deimos gave up (which I am glad that he didn't). I'm sure for others the site was already "dead".
So while that's not Tildes' goal, I can empathize with other sites that do want some growth, potentially fast (i.e. within a years' time) growth lest the site dies off completely.
to some extetnt, yes. But at a scale of reddit I feel that is part of what turns into the addictive nature at worst. You end up spending minutes, maybe a few hours in a single comment section, hearing the bustle and personal experiences and in-fighting and all the other noise that is inevitable when you're scrolling through thousands of comments. You'd need very careful moderation to control that and keep it high quality and most of reddit's subs don't care about that. I'm sure Tildes would care more, but we certainly can't handle that volume of comments as of now. So I fear it'd go by the wayside for different reasons.
Of course the more typical case is that you glaze through a few top level comments and the most popular replies and then tire out before adding your own input. I'm not quite sure how much it discourages new top level comments because for older threads I visit I do tend to sort by new to find those. I don't bother on reddi because posts disappear after a day, but that sorting is more useful here on Tildes that has longer lasting posts.
It could also be that the majority supports having the reply button at the top, but users learned quick they should just accept it so they seem like "they belong"
It's actually the official philosophy of the site per the documentation.
I'm new, but I'm in team keep the comment box at the bottom. I want to respect the design philosophy that is here, but also, I think reading the comments on the way down leads to better discussion, less repetition in comments.
Also reduces "dogpiling" because people will see the thing they want to impulsively scold someone with already said one or more times. Hopefully this discourages people from engaging unnecessarily and avoid adding heat to an already heated thread.
I'm new and still find the ordering a little confusing. I get reddits "most votes at the top" method, and BBs style "just put all comments in order."
Tildes is sort of a combo that I don't really understand.
Tildes is basically “most votes at the top”, but it adds some weighting based on how people have labeled comments, which (ideally, at least), should push less-useful comments towards the bottom. If you're coming from Reddit, you can think of it as balancing out the lack of a downvote button. And you can, of course, change the Tildes sorting method to just vote-based, or just time-based.
I still haven't decided what sorting mechanism I prefer for the front page, though.
Yep, and if you want to see exactly how the comment labels effect the sorting:
https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#labelling-comments
cc: @Dr_Amazing
I personally fully agree with @cfabbro and didn't even realize that was another reason why I really like Tildes.
Replying to a person in a thread directly creates an actual in-depth conversation instead of dozens of people asking or saying the same thing with no responses or, worse, a fragmented conversation where the first 2 identical posts have a few decent reply threads each and the other 12 redundant posts have 0-1 replies.
I'd rather have 1 top level comment with dozens of threaded replies instead of 12 different identical top level comments with a few replies each.
I think people saying they don’t like it simply weren’t used to it. Whether or not you decide to move it, I wouldn’t necessarily factor in those threads — engagement takes effort, and sometimes people want a low effort option. Doesn’t necessarily mean it should be provided.
In hugely commented threads the position of the comment box can be a bother, but the vast majority of posts are not affected by this. Having the comment box at the bottom is definitely a net positive since it incentivizes better and more informed responses.
If there can't be a choice, I'd stick to the current philosophy and defer the arguments to the writers of said philosophy.
But otherwise, I feel the ideal choice is "philosophy as default, but options for power users". That creates a default consensus, but allows those who feel strongly (which tend to be a minority) to tweak their own experience.
e.g. I understand that Tildes (At least in the beginning) wanted to feel like one big community instead of a dozen subreddits, so I understand being "subbed" to every group when I sign up. However, I use it for very specific reasons, so I still decided to opt out of half the groups after signing up. I understand the philosophy but can still make my own personal choice in the end.
I’m more than happy to add it back to the bar as an option if it won’t upset anyone 😄 But to be honest, what the others said makes sense. And ‘power users’ probably would be the ones who are most likely to read, right ?
At the top or at the bottom, it’s still only 1 scroll / tap away from the average comment. At least it’s not a floating action button, I suppose 😄
Yeah, it's a minor thing at the end of the day and I'm honestly neutral about it. Like, I wouldn't download an app or make an extension purely to change that feature. Just giving my general thoughts to how I approach user preferences/options. At least, when I'm not strongly opinionated about the feature myself.
One thing you could do is default to the box at the bottom and put an option in the settings to move it to the top. That might be a good compromise between the philosophy of ~tildes and what people want in a functional app.
Wow, another app! Your app looks excellent so far. So many features already too. It's safe to say my app Three Cheers will be the ugliest of the new Tildes apps coming out.
I wouldn't say RIF was pretty either, but it served me the best nonetheless. To be honest, probably because of that. It had none of the fluff of new reddit, which is a good thing.
I'm sure TC will be worth it.
I agree with this guy. I used RIF when I was on Android ! Loved it :)
Still on Android, still on RIF. Will use Three Cheers as soon as it's available.
@talklittle, if you want an alpha tester then I'm more than happy to throw APKs on my OnePlus.
Tomorrow will be a sad day, mourned by all RIF users.
I just realized Three Cheers will be for iOS too. And it supports older versions. So even though I didn’t use RIF, you have the draw of those of us on an older iOS. Thanks for that! :)
I used RiF for nearly 12 years. It was not "pretty" but I absolutely loved it. Dark mode and minimalistic was all I wanted.
Any plans to set your app apart? This one is clean af
Three Cheers looks kind of like the Tildes website so far. If you are loving Surfboard then by all means keep using Surfboard! Different apps for different tastes.
Well, there’s Android support; Older iOS support; And from what I saw in your demo, Three Cheers loads much faster than Surfboard (all my parsing is a bit slow..)
So you’ve already got me beat by default for many people 😄 I’m personally looking forward to the release 👍
I'm not sure what all these people are saying exactly, but I thought RIF was beautiful! I used it daily for nearly 12 years, thank you!
Happy weekend fellas. Got a good amount of stuff done this weekend:
That's a lot of changes, and not a lot of testing, so some things may be broken :D As always, let me know if you run into issues.
Have a great week everyone, cheers !
Excellent work! Thanks
Loving the app so far! Would there be an option in the future to change what interacted links looks like? On the tildes website gruvbox has purple links for threads you’ve already clicked on.
Mornin' y'all ! I just pushed a small update fixing some bugs and adding some of the most requested features.
Have a great Friday :)
EDIT: Pushed another build with a few more items.
Really liking the more compact views. I also like how you wound up implementing the in-line reply form. Great job!
Hey, just wanted to say I LOVE your app. I’m an app designer by trade and your app is the shit. Very thoughtful design and touches. Love the roadmap too - that’s helpful to limit questions I’m sure.
Really great job, keep on crushing it!
Comments like this are what makes it worth it. Thanks chief ! 🫶
Really nice, thank-you! Exactly what I was looking for.
I'm trying hard to figure out what the colors on the posts mean though, they don't seem to line up with new/exemplary comments exactly?
Hi, not sure exactly what colors you mean but here’s some of what Surfboard colors:
Surfboard doesn’t yet parse the exemplary/joke/malice/etc labels, so none of the colors relate to that. It’s on the roadmap, I’ll probably get to it after I add topic posting.
Ah OK, makes sense now! I would definitely appreciate the option to turn it off, though ;)
Apologies if I come across as critical, I think the app is very impressive overall. You've done a great job.
One other improvement I'd suggest (beyond supporting tag filtering) is to cache the parse results, at least for a time. And then only parse whatever new comment html that is not already in your cache. Currently, loading a large topic such as the groups suggestion topic takes 7-8 seconds on my phone, presumably because its re-parsing the entire tree every time I visit.
Assuming you mean the colored lines next to comments? If not, feel free to clarify. I’ll add a setting for it in the next build.
Not at all, no worries. All feedback is welcome, as long as it is respectful :)
Will add it soon
Will definitely add it, but not sure when yet. I need to solidify some more parts of the architecture as I flesh out the core functionality.
Correct, and yeah it’s definitely the worst part of the app. Sorry about that 😅
One suggestion on Compact view: tag cloud being variable width is rather distracting, maybe move it below group / author and content type?
Also, awesome update, thanks!
Sure, I could probably add a toggle to have that as a separate line.
BTW did you try Minimal ? It might be more what you want, although maybe it’s a little too cramped for you.
Thanks for the feedback !
EDIT: Ah now I think I see what you actually meant. The tags aren’t supposed to roll over onto another line, it should trail off with a “…” That bug will be fixed in the next build.
I think Compact / Minimal choice comes down to very subtle preferences. I went with Compact because I like overall post size and height seems to be less variable but I don't think I'm very representative sample and I don't want to nitpick too much. I'm sure whatever you go with for tags should be fine given that you recognized current behavior as a bug.
Amazing update. Thought I’d like minimal but a small font compact is perfect.
Can’t wait for what you do next.
Suggestion - website links get a preview when in the topic text. Probably needs a bot/ai type of solution but a man can dream.
Thanks for the kind words.
https://surfboard.tarrouye.net/b/5v82q6vg/feature-ideas/display-previews-for-links-found-in-topic-body
Added 👍 Feel free to give it a vote if you’d like.
I've been LOVING the app. The UI is very clean, and I love the gesture support.
One feature I really enjoyed in Apollo which would be great is a button to dismiss all of your already viewed topics - an easy way to concentrate on new topics
Not sure if you saw these options in the top-right of the feeds.
If you did & that’s not what you’re asking for, please feel free to clarify.
Thanks for the feedback 👍
Awesome that's exactly what I was looking for, sorry I missed it! I'll play around with it a bit - wonder if it could be made more discoverable / prominent. Thanks for the hard work!
No worries. How prominent would you like it ? I’m happy to add an option for it. How about a floating button in the bottom-right of the feed ?
I’m also considering an option to remove the posts from the feed as you open them (i.e. when you come back from reading it would no longer be in the feed). Not sure if that’s something people would want though.
A floating button at the bottom of the feed sounds perfect.
As far as behavior goes, to me the ideal behavior is to only get rid of posts you've seen up to the point at which you trigger the action. That is to say don't auto remove posts as you go into them and come back (or any after you last performed the action). The current way it works is you trigger the action, it gets rid of posts you've seen (great!), but then once you go into a post and come back, it gets rid of that post as well (to me, an inconvenience, since I have to untoggle the hide viewed post setting). Reasoning behind this is I might accidentally gesture out of the thread, and want to go back. Or after I make a comment, might want to go back pretty immediately. If it was gated behind another user action, it would seem to be more my fault and thus acceptable.
I see, you’d like it to act more like a one time action than enabling a filter.
If it worked that way, what would you expect to happen when refreshing the feed ? Unread posts would show again ?
I’ll put it under consideration
Correct! I could totally see this as living besides the current filter implementation.
As Tildes gets bigger, I imagine it will be harder and harder to reach the bottom, at which point refreshing the feed should also be reduced
Thanks for considering it!
Any plans for Android?
No; sorry to disappoint.
Great stuff. Really enjoying this app so thanks for all the hard work.
Is the best way to submit suggestions/bugs here or through test flight?
The (current) best way to submit suggestions & minor bugs is here.The best way to submit a crash report is through the “Share” button on the popup Testflight shows if the app crashes, as this will include some logs.
The best way to submit feature requests & bug reports is to add it to the issue tracker and/or leave a comment on this thread and I’ll get around to adding it myself.
Thanks !
Just downloaded this today and it’s looking really nice! I was a heavy Apollo user and I found myself repeatedly swiping on the website trying to reply, vote, or collapse comments. The Tildes mobile website is fantastic, but I do miss the gestures.
Wow. I just stumbled upon https://wefwef.app and suddenly i’m questioning this statement
Holy hell that’s a well designed mobile web-app. Highly recommend checking it out, props to the dev.
It looks really good and defaults to text size I was using in Apollo. I know someone mentioned adjusting text size for accessibility but I think many would appreciate text size slider in settings. I find myself scrolling constantly due to how big it is in Surfboard.
I agree the base text size for the comment / topic content is a little bit too big right now. I’ll bring it down a bit to match the rest of the app. I’ll also look into the slider ;)
Well, define “outperform”.
You might achieve feature parity in a web app, but I’d still think a strong argument for native would be efficiency in terms of power draw/battery usage.
Granted, I’m no expert, I barely know some CS basics, but I can only imagine there’s going to be some overhead from running within a browser… (is this something WASM would/will change? Educate me please, corrections are very welcome!)
Appendix: That is very much not to discredit the work of Alexander Harding (wefwef developer) in any way! I have tried it and it is incredible how functional and easy to use it is (and how much the design is reminiscent of Apollo’s, RIP).
Honestly I don’t think the overhead from running in Safari makes much of a difference, especially for this kind of application. I could be wrong though, not something I’ve looked toooo much into
Thanks for sharing this. I'm truly amazed. I've been searching for a good Lemmy UI, and this seems to be it.
Right ? This is the only way I access Lemmy 😂 Apollo will live on in our hearts 💜
Hello, hello. Long time no see. Apologies for letting the beta expire; been quite busy with other stuff and didn't want to release a new version of Surfboard until I had time to fix some annoying bugs, but here we are :D
I've been quietly plugging away and filling in missing feature holes, and this update brings Surfboard that little bit closer to feature complete with improvements such as tag filtering.
I'm aware of some rather annoying bugs, especially on IOS 17, relating to comments shifting when collapsing/expanding them & swipe actions not working. Apologies for those, they'll be my priority for the next update (whenever that happens to be..)
Latest Patch Notes:
Limit removed comment menu contents properly
Fix collapsed state for removed comments with children
Disable swipe actions on removed comments
Fix unable to tap on source portion of feed item
Better, richer link previews in posts, feed items, and comments
Add browser override option for YouTube/twitter links (i.e. open them in the respective app instead of in Surfboard's browser) (enabled by default)
Add text-to-speech options
Adjusted label/highlight behavior
Improved ‘new comments’ UI indicator in posts stats
Added other tabs to logged in account view
Fix opening topic from account doesn’t mark new comments as seen
Fix a bug where you could open your own profile from your profile
Fixed share comment as image UI
Fix initial fetch on account
Added option to search feed by tags
Added options to filter by tag from the tags themselves (tap and hold on a tag to see the options depending on context)
Fixed tag query escaping
Tweaked search wording
Better nav title for feeds with tags & group filters active
Added option to mark all notifications as read if you have more than 1 unread notification
Added option to show username on tab bar
No apology needed @earlsweatshirt. This new update is incredible, thank you much for the hard work!
Love the new embeds!
Love you ! 💜😆 Enjoy
This is a great update! Loving the new clickable links!
Ahem
Hey, thanks for all the work you’ve put into the app - I use it regularly. Looks like the beta expired again. Please consider publishing it on the App Store, or setting a reminder to publish a new beta version every 75-80 days, even one with minimal changes, so regular users like myself don’t get disrupted.
Sorry
All good, I know life can be hectic, especially around the holidays and new year. Thanks again for your work on Surfboard, and for pushing a new build!
Thank you!
The app looks great but I do have a few questions. Are you working with someone (or maybe yourself) on an android app? Is there a dark mode option? And finally, is there a way to condense the UI more? I was a big fan of RIF (redditIsFun) for Reddit and it's minimalist layout. I also was a old.reddit user and could not use the new website layout and it's why I couldn't use the Reddit app.
These are just my preferences and I understand that not everyone will like the same things.
Keep an eye on Three Cheers for Tildes, which is the app being developed by the creator of RIF, @talklittle.
That guy is awesome. Native apps for iOS and Android, what a champ !
That said, I heard the RIF dev themselves is building a Tildes app. I’m sure it’ll blow mine out of the water ;)
I'm salty that there's not an android version :|
I’m sorry :/ When it comes to mobile, I only know UIKit 😅
That's a second mobile app for Tildes that I've seen posted here that's iOS only! To say that I'm disappointed is an understatement.
Happy weekend y'all, just pushed out another updated addressing some of your feedback.
Added theme options for the thread bar colors, including an option to turn them off @streblo
Added an option to dim read posts even if they have new comments @dlacuran
Fixed new comments not being marked as seen on feed when opening topic
Rearranged some Settings
Added ability to delete your own comment
Fixed remove bookmark on comment was not working
Made adjustments to comment collapsing @atmofunk @kiceg
Fixed post would auto-collapse again even if user opened it when navigating backwards if setting was enabled
Added more line limits to avoid overflow with large text sizes
Added system option to font size setting @onyxleopard
This build might overwrite your font & feed size settings - apologies for the inconvenience.
You’ve been busy, thank-you!
I’ve been testing out the app over the weekend as the only way I’ve been accessing Tildes. It’s quite good, but I’ll list a few things I’ve noticed that I’m not sure have been mentioned yet. Just some things for consideration, no expectations or anything!
Speaking of collapsing, I’d love to have collapsing be handled the same way it is in the ‘Hackers’ HN app. When I collapse a comment, I only want to collapse that comment and it’s children, not it’s parent.Looks like this is the case as long as you don’t gesture collapse. Disregard!Edit, 1 more:
To be honest I find this part a little confusing / frustrating on the website. The reason is that the collapsed / expanded state you will enter the page in won’t be one that you can recreate yourself, since collapsing any comment normally collapses all of its children. So, I’ll enter the page, open a comment’s parent, close it again, and the layout is different. I find it confusing. Anyways that was a long message when the real answer is I’ll probably add a toggle for you ;)
There are two collapse gestures: collapse & collapse thread. Collapse works the same as tapping the comment, while collapse thread will collapse it to the top-level parent. I believe (not near my computer to check right now, sorry) that collapse thread is the default gesture there, but you can change everything in settings.
I’ll note this for when I get to that part
Drag from the very edge of the left side towards the right, it should do what you want :)
After posting !
They should be, almost everywhere. Let me know where they aren’t 👍
This will come with profile support, since your profile and other’s profiles are the same afaict.
Like, completely get rid of the section? There’s an option to collapse that section by default, if that works for you.
That makes sense, probably it should be the default actually. I’ll think about it a bit.
(I’m replying via Surfboard, and can’t easily quote your comment — maybe an option to collapse the preview and be able to select text from the parent would be helpful?)
Re: comment collapsing, thinking about it some more I wouldn’t worry about this. The reason I dislike having the whole tree expanded because it’s not immediately clear which sub tree is of interest, I have to go through and look at the time on all the posts to find the new one. Once comment highlight is here, I think that goes away.
As for the rest, you’ve answered the rest of my questions, thank-you!
Yeah, this is a fair point. I’ve gotten in the habit of copying the comment text before replying, then I’ll paste it in the reply and format my reply around the parts I want to quote. Not exactly ideal.
The big issue is that my markdown renderer doesn’t support selecting the text at all, and I’m not sure when I’ll get around to resolving that.
I’ll try to think of some other solutions in the meantime.
Thanks again for all your feedback ! It’s helpful (and gratifying!) to hear how it’s working for others.
I just shipped another update adding posting & deleting topics, but unfortunately probably won’t get to work on it much the next week. Slowly and surely I’ll get to everything though ;)
Thanks!!
boom! Thats exactly what I was talking about, and so fast too. Well played sir - ty!
Your favorite Tildes themes, coming soon to Surfboard.
Shoutout your favorite themes that aren’t already on Tildes to get them included !
EDIT: Themes have shipped !! Super excited to get that part built out and pretty pleased with how it came out :)
Happy to report that Surfboard has taken the place of Apollo app on my home screen. Loving it so far!
I am running Atom One Dark on desktop
Atom One will be there ;)
I love the themes! It’s amazing to see how much work you’ve done over the past few days. I think I updated my app 3-4 times today alone. Amazing!
I personally really enjoy Paraiso Dark. YML here.
I really love the background of that one. Thanks for sharing
Is this about how you’d expect it to look ?
That YML didn’t include all the colors I use so I had to go a little bit off script (found a few more in the Atom Paraiso theme)
Yes, that looks lovely! :)
It’s quickly becoming my favorite theme 😍 Thanks again for the shoutout
This is awesome! Currently using Dracula now. The one theme I would love to see that isn’t on Tildes yet is Nord. Would love to see this eventually added to Surfboard in the future! Keep up the great work with this app!
Nord Light & Dark
This is awesome! Keep up the great work with this app!
It’s neither a bug, nor a discontinuation; Rather, poor timing & being overwhelmed with other things on my part. I’ll get it back up shortly, and apologies to everyone for the inconvenience.
No worries! Thanks for fixing it so quickly! It’s a great app :)
Seconded :)
Thirded!
Side note: I would love to know more about the plans for an API. Parsing Markdown is enough fun without needing to parse HTML too 😆
Only @Deimos can answer the API question... but as for parsing, from another comment of mine related to that:
Thanks for that, I’ve got a GFM parser. It’s more about what I do with it at that point to render it nicely.. And the fact that I’m starting with HTML instead of the source markdown. But, nothing that can’t be dealt with. That part seems to be working alright now..
I appreciate all the quick & helpful responses from you !
Glad to be of help. :) And if you have any other questions, feel free to ask. I may not be able to answer all of them, but I can hopefully at least point you in the right direction for where to find the answers.
Replying from your app, has a nice interface. I can see some Apollo inspiration for sure.
I will try to break it as much as possible, though I’m not a power user. Just a simple read and post guy.
Really would love to have the “create image from comments” feature from Apollo.
Honest question, what are the benefits of such a feature? I kinda feel like it flies in the face of Tildes' user privacy focus, and would also potentially violate the Code of Conduct:
Not the person you are asking, but its main purpose was sharing a post from someone with the original context. If you wanted to show some folks on Discord or elsewhere a particularly funny or relevant or interesting post, it made it easier to show it with original formatting and preserved user attribution without having to actually visit Reddit. I believe there was also a way to black out usernames for situations where the content was more important or relevant than who shared it (or you were posting it somewhere that required redaction of usernames to avoid brigading).
Ah, gotcha. That does make sense, and I suppose if it automatically blacked out the usernames that would be okay (or less bad for privacy, at least).
Yep, I always used the name censor. Just felt right. If I do build a similar feature, that probably will just be the default.
Basically it was useful if you wanted to share a specific section of a thread with others - especially if that section was bigger than a screenshot.
I assume Apollo preserved the context (back and forth between users) by color coding the censor bars based on the original usernames? If not, I think that would be a pretty nice feature for your app if you added a similar screenshot comments feature. :)
Apollo included the colored bars on the side, so kind of, but the censors were all black. Neat idea though ;) I might play with it.
I turned on the “hash coding” for usernames and it’s nice having each user in the thread color coded. I never heard of such a censor feature before but it does sound neat.
I yoinked that hashing part from one of my other apps. It can be fun :) I actually have it off right now ^:)
Basically what they said.
As far as privacy goes. There’s only so much that can be done for a public facing forum. The same could be achieved with a screenshot.
All the save as image feature does is clean it up, let you censor or attribute the username, and grab how many ever layers of context you want.
Personally, I mainly used the feature to share long informative posts with my wife without having to send her 3 or 4 screenshots. It was also very handy for making an album of recipes while also capturing suggestions from other users.
Same goes for genre related music recommendations. I would grab the post, and there would always be a nice top level comment with some additional relevant recommendations. Or several in the event of “what are some great underground blah blah blah?” Kinda of posts.
Just made it really easy to format all of that and save it for future reference.
True, but there is no sense in making it that much easier for people. If the feature included username censoring by default (which OP seems to support), that would certainly help allay my concerns though.
Precisely. Being a dick should be hard. Stalking should be hard. Making it easy normalizes the behavior. Making it hard makes it clear that being over-invested in tracking this sort of thing is unhealthy and weird.
Hey @geniusraunchyassman, the latest build includes an early beta of such a feature.
It only works for one comment at a time right now, no thread options, but take a look and let me know what you think.
I’ll add more options to that once some more of the basics are fleshed out.
Example with your comment
Awesome. Thank you for putting that in so fast!
Two things that come to mind immediately.
taking the input from others, using the feature keeps usernames in the comment text body. So adding some blur to mentions in the may be useful.
I use dark mode for everything. So it would be nifty if the background were dark in the image that is generated as well. Right now it uses a white background and it’s a little jarring.
Hope that is helpful feedback and thanks again. :)
Regarding mentions in the body, I worry that censoring those could remove too much context. For a very simple example, if I comment « @earlsweatshirt seems really mean » and then the name is censored, that comment is missing too much context IMO.
Maybe as an option ? Curious others’ thoughts here.
Not TMI, and no need to apologize. Your mental health is far more important than a Tildes app. Speaking of which, if you regularly experience that extra dose of depression during the winter months, you may have Seasonal Affective Disorder, which I suffer from too. From another comment of mine on ~health.mental:
I don’t have anything hugely important to say; but I did just want to say thanks for this. I agree that an app specifically built for a single purpose will be able to do a better job than a webpage on a mobile device, and I can’t pretend that needing to open up a tab in Chrome was a good replacement for Apollo. Thanks for your hard work, and I’m looking forward to using it and hopefully helping to make this a success!
Adding onto this comment to also say thanks - I had a bookmarked shortcut app icon that’d open a new instance of Tildes, which definitely worked well for me because I really liked the mobile web app design, but I’m a really big fan of your app. Coming from Apollo, the color bar comment hierarchies and ability to collapse/expand a comment through the comment header are very aesthetically familiar and convenient UI designs that are easy on my eyes and brain. :) Feeling very fortunate to find this on Apollo’s/3PA’s last day.
Thank you for all your hard work and your openness to feedback throughout your post! Making my first Tildes comment through your app, and I’m looking forward to providing feedback through TestFlight (or any other platform that’s preferable)!
Holy moly you've got a lot done! I'm very impressed. Happy to see other devs working on a Tildes app too. The more the merrier, in my opinion!
Coming from Apollo, I like the app so far, and I love that you are engaging with users, taking feedback, and iterating the design.
This may be extremely subjective, but something a little jarring coming from Reddit-
When I see a comment score of 0 I assume it was “downvoted,” which certainly isn’t how tildes works. Maybe instead of showing 0 you could hide the count?
Hmm.. I can see your point for sure. Here’s my problem: without the number, the arrow alone would be too small to tap.
So how about, if it’s 0, it’ll just say “Vote”. More of a call-to-action than a call-outEdit: I’ve decided to just remove it everywhere if it’s 0 and the setting is enabled. There are 3 other ways to access the vote option, anyways. (Menu, Context Menu, Swipe Action)
I agree with 0 feeling negative because of the Reddit implications. You could have it as a dash - or make the clickable area larger.
I think having the vote visible at the top goes slightly against the tildes culture (I might be wrong I’m very new) as it puts too much emphasis on it’s importance and that desire to garner upvotes. In the web interface it’s at the bottom of the comment making it less important.
Hey y’all; I wanna make sure I don’t lose track of anyone’s requests / issues, especially if I said I’ll address it, but there has been a lot more activity than I expected 😅.
I’ve spun up an issue tracker which you can find here: https://surfboard.tarrouye.net
It would be very helpful if you could log your requests/bugs there with your comments, and include a link to that Idea when commenting here, so I can track everything easier.
I appreciate everyone checking it out 👍 I hope it’s been an enjoyable experience :)
This tracker will probably soon replace the roadmap and feedback link in the app
Prepare for more “why is your name purple?” (;
To be honest, I’ll probably remove that part eventually. More of a legacy / fun throwback to Apollo from the very first day of the project; I don’t think my account needs to be marked specially, especially as way more people are using the app than I ever expected 😅
What’s that? A sneak peek of Surfboard draped in Dracula ? 👀
Couple thoughts:
Thanks!
Just found the “You've reached the end. Time to go outside ?” message, nice
Any ETA on an official launch, @earlsweatshirt? Not trying to rush you, I'm only asking because I want to actually buy the app to help support continued development. :)
p.s. Same question about your app too, @wababa. :)
And I'm also still looking forward to your app as well, @talklittle, especially since my iPhone is old and only supports iOS 15.7. So I've only been able to use the above apps on my iPad.
I actually don’t have any plans to release the app for money. I might put it on the App Store, for free, once it feels more feature complete (some obvious stuff like comment labeling etc are must haves, and I’d like to polish it up much more).
If you want to support the development (much appreciated, by the way) you can toss me a one-time donation via Github Sponsors, Paypal or send me Ethereum at 0xc42feefe9e4e6777c73d6d04f19f2bd28f19a6e3.
But, I just want to point out that while appreciated, it’s not required or expected. I have a day job, and I built Surfboard for pleasure and to give back to the community - not to make money.
Cheers !
In that case have a couple cups of coffee on me. ;)
💜 And where is your page, so I can donate for all the work you do adjusting tags and such here on Tildes ? 😝
Hah, no need. Seeing Tildes continue to thrive is reward enough for me. :)
Same. Since there’s more options listed now than just the GitHub sponsoring compared to when I last checked, I had to use that opportunity. :P
💜 y’all are too kind. Have a great weekend :)
For Backtick, I'm planning on releasing after finishing the following:
To be honest it's not a lot of work, but I've been taking my time and enjoying the process so I'm not sure when it will be all completed. I'm also developing an unofficial Tildes API at the same time that I'm planning on open sourcing so my time has been split on that as well.
I am super excited to release though, so momentum is still strong!
Oh, in that case, this might interest you. @earlsweatshirt mentioned you (and @talklittle) in the topic text, but AFAIK mentions/pings still don't work in topic text, so you might have missed it.
Glad to hear! :)
Just posted a comment, thank you!
The TestFlight beta expired! Help!
I literally just came here to say the same thing. Great app - do you have any more of those beta invites?? (insert chapelle Tyrone Biggums meme here)
My phone is now complaining that the beta has expired, FYI.
The only issue I get is being signed out each time I open the app, other than that it’s been amazing for me.
Please add in some accessibility features, specifically the ability to increase the font-size. Not all of us a great at seeing. Plus, if you design with an ability to use a larger font size, the whole app will become more information dense - which is always a plus!
It does support the system Dynamic Type, so you can get pretty huge fonts.
Here’s an example
It should also support VoiceOver, although I may have missed some labels..
Let me know if there’s any other accessibility features you’d like to see 👀
Thanks! Thats about the font size that I use normally.
Replying from your app! I love the preview of the comment displaying the formatting. Love the gesture control features as well. Reminds me of the Narwhal app I used for Reddit!
I will continue to try and run it through its paces and report any bugs I encounter. Cheers!
That formatted preview (well, really everything to do with the HTML / Markdown parsing) has eaten way more than its fair share of the dev time on this project so far. I really didn’t want to release the app until at least most of the common formatting looked good. Glad you like it 😆
Nice touch adding the formatting buttons and modified feed views. You’re doing great work , I’m still loving the app!
So far I’m liking it. Nice work. I do think the information density on the main page could be a little tighter. Right now there is a lot of empty space on my main page. I’m not sure what can be done or added, but just wanted to give my $.02
A lot of people seem to feel that way. I’ll definitely make a compact feed version. I personally prefer a little more space, so I started with the breathier version 😄 Selfish, I know..
As a counter point I originally didn’t like the spaced out feeling, but it may fit more with the “vibe” of tildes. Too compact can be information overload and everyone is just used to it. I like that I run out of tildes posts and can set it down feeling a sense of completion.
Thanks for the feedback! I obviously like the current feed UI, so compact will be just an option ;)
Copying my above comment here…
Would love any opinions from compact lovers, because that’s just not very me 😄
EDIT: And now I know I need to fix my renderer to handle links in quotes 😅 A little invisible, that one..
Good evening :) Quick 1hr update tonight polishing up a couple of issues from the previous build. (Thanks again to those reporting feedback & sending in their crash reports - y'all the MVPs)
Thanks for that feedback.
I’ve done a bit of testing on an iPhone 11 and for sure there is plenty of room for optimization.
Would you say that the performance in general is sluggish or there are some specific actions that feel laggy ?
I’m aware of issues related to the swipe gestures on various devices, and I plan to rewrite that component to resolve the issues there. I haven’t got much feedback on other performance things, so definitely appreciate your insight there.
No promises on features or timelines, but I can promise that I will keep working on Surfboard in my free time until it meets my standards, and if I feel like I just don’t have the time anymore I will simply open-source it and hope someone can take up the mantle :)
Ah yeah that’s makes sense. The parsing is indeed quite heavy, and the weaker the CPU the longer it will chug on that part. I have in my long term plans some ideas to improve that (particularly, lazy loading of the comments instead of loading them all at once). However, it’s also something that would be completely negated by an official API. I hope that eventually there will be one, so for now I’m not worrying tooo much about the parsing part, at least until more UI is built out.
Yep. Surfboard is 100% Swift, and the vast majority of the UI is SwiftUI, with a little UIKit just because SwiftUI isn’t fully mature yet.
Ever since downloading surfboard, 90% of my time spent on Tildes has been through the app. It’s been an awesome experience.
Love this app for Tildes. I’m curious what you’re thinking for timeline for going from Testflight to the App Store? I’d be very sad if my beta ran out before it was live for download. Appreciate your work on this!
Hey; sorry for the late response. Was on vacation the last week.
I don’t have any plans to bring it to the App Store, at least until there’s an official API and developer agreement. But, if it makes you feel better, I’ll make sure to refresh the beta if it comes close to expiring before I have a new build to release.
Hello!
No rush but it looks like the beta has expired :)
How was your vacation? Go anywhere exciting/exotic, or was it a staycation? I hope you had a fun and/or relaxing time regardless. :)
I stayed local and just unplugged a bit and took time off of work, but a bunch of my friends flew out from various places. We were attending the Valorant Champions Tour finals 😆 It was an awesome experience ! Thanks for the well wishes, I hope you had a wonderful weekend and start of the new week as well :)
Oh nice. I don't play or watch Valorant, but I have closely followed a few other esports in the past (StarCraft, SC2, Rocket League) and have always wanted to attend an event in person. They always look like so much fun, especially the finals!
And I did have a nice weekend, thanks. I slept a lot, which I desperately needed after the previous 20+ days of almost no sleep due to my dog getting infected cysts in his paw. :/ He's all healed up now though, and finally off the steroids and antibiotics, so is no longer waking me up every few hours to go pee. So I finally got a bunch of glorious uninterrupted sleep! :P
Thanks that’s awesome! I use this app daily
I would pay $5-10 for the app.
Same - I’d pay more for lifetime access.
My first impression after poking around for a bit is this is a phenomenal app with a clear Apollo inspiration. I do have two suggestions, though:
Collapse or partially hide the original post when visiting a thread already viewed. On the web app, you automagically scroll to the first unseen comment chain, so even something like that would be welcome.
An option for a more compact timeline/feed view.
Thanks for taking the time to developing such a neat app. It may become my primary Tildes access on my iPhone.
I could totally add an option to scroll it to the start of the comments when entering an already viewed topic. It already does that when you change the comments filter, so shouldn’t be much trouble to add.
I’ll probably also add some way to collapse the post.
This has 2 votes already, so it’s definitely on the list :)
💜
Thanks for the taking the time to comment
What's behind your decision for the iOS 16+ requirement?
I use certain APIs, like this one, which require iOS 16+, unfortunately. They make my life easier..
This is a huge nitpick from my side but the comment collapse behavior seems to be off. The comment I'm trying to collapse changes position and I can't determine where will it end up.
My first thought about a solution is this:
These are IMO more predictable than current behavior.
Edit: here's an example of a long comment with unpredictable collapse/expand behavior https://tildes.net/~tech/1741/i_want_to_give_linux_another_shot_i_got_some_questions_am_looking_for_general_distro#comment-8xyz
BTW huge congrats on the app, it's looking really slick even at this early stage!
Are you talking about « collapse » or « collapse thread » ? They work differently in terms of where you end up after collapsing.
Any collapsed comment will hide all replies to it; I could add a toggle for that if people want, but it made the most sense to me this way.
I checked both just now and it does not really matter if it's the whole thread or just one comment. In both cases the one-line header for collapsed comment will move (i believe it's the middle of the screen?)
Definitely not something that breaks the app entirely but a bit of unpredictable behavior, for longer threads / comments I need a split second to grasp where I ended up ;)
I just tried on the comment you linked (thanks BTW). To me, it’s pretty obvious (though the yellow highlight from the link definitely helps). It should go to the center of the page, unless it’s too close to one of the edges. I’m wondering if you’re experiencing something different or if I should add a highlight.
If it’s not much trouble, a screen recording might help me understand 😅
EDIT: Now I am seeing it.. It is a bit jank sometimes. I’ll try and fix it up
I think I got it, I must be too used to behavior from Apollo (it always ends up aligned to the top of the screen there).
I also noticed a related issue. When you expand a long comment it shows the middle instead of beginning.
I'll send a recording that shows both but I'd prefer to do it through testflight.
No worries, I think I’ve figured it out 🤞
I’ll push a new build later with hopefully fixed collapsing behavior.
I’ve also added a toggle to highlight comments that are being scrolled to. Mostly for debugging, but maybe it can help you follow it better.
EDIT: That build is out now. Let me know if people are still having issues with the collapsing.
Late to this particular issue as i just downloaded your app (love it btw) - but I, too, feel the comment/thread collapsing feels a bit off:
When I swipe to collapse, my personal expectation is for the header to remain exactly where it was when i collapsed it, but instead it flies to the top of my screen. It’s a bit disorienting - if I’m collapsing something it means I’m moving on to the next comment, which i already have my eyes on, relative to the position of the the thread i just collapsed - if that makes sense?
Anyway, keep up the great work, this app has legs :D
I do think the current behavior of scrolling it to the top makes sense for threads, and for long comments (if the target is past the top, basically), but if the comment is already centered in view I agree it shouldn’t move.
I’ll look into adjusting it after fleshing out some more of the core unless it’s really bothering people. Thanks for the feedback ☝️
A surprisingly nice and polished client for a TestFlight app. My only major request would be adding the option to disable tapping on names in comments as a way to view profiles.
I suspect for the right handed majority this isn’t an issue but as I hold my phone in my left hand and use my left thumb for tapping comments to collapse/uncollapse them I’ve noticed I often accidentally tap names and get directed to the respective user’s page. This is mainly an issue for uncollapsing comments and collapsing shorter comments.
I did incidentally have the same issue on Apollo out of the box but luckily the option for disabling the functionality was there and it solved my problem immediately, which is the basis of my request for it here.
While these misclicks (mistaps?) are my own fault and I’m sure with time I could adjust my tapping behaviour to avoid the issue it would be a tremendously appreciated boon to QOL if the option were added.
Edit: After further use I’d like to suggest the same for the vote counter which is similarly easy to unintentionally tap when trying to uncollapse a comment when using your left thumb for navigation.
I’ll get on it 👍 Thanks for the feedback :)
I keep instinctively tapping or double-tapping the bottom left "Topics" icon, thinking it will scroll all the way to the top. Would love if this occurred!
I’ll definitely look into that. People are probably used to it from other apps.
I'm really enjoying the latest Testflight update. The compact and minimal views are definitely more to my liking. Thanks!
Overall this is looking promising.
Any plans to support iOS’s dynamic text instead of having the app-specific font sizes in settings?
Also, it’s a little awkward to be linked out to a web view to look at your own profile page.
Any plans to support Apollo’s feature of tapping on the top bar to jump between the top of the page and the previous scroll position? This is a life saver if you want to go between the OP and where you left off, or to scroll back in case of accidentally touching to top bar?
It actually used to, but a lot of people were asking for a setting within the app 😅 I’ll add another setting to go back to the old behavior of following the system setting. Thanks for the feedback !
100%. This will be brought into the app once user profile pages are ready.
Never really heard of it but that sounds neat. I’ll put it on the list, probably a lower priority though.
(You can vote for it here to increase the priority)
Would be nice if I tapped on Account I could see all activity. Then other taps for all topics created or all comments.
Also if there was a listing of all the groups so you could jump into a specific group. And then inside the group an easy way to subscribe/unsubscribe from a group. Thinking something like the subreddit screen on Apollo.
Thanks!
I think it’s on the roadmap!
https://surfboard.tarrouye.net/roadmap/add-functionality-to-browse-the-available-groups
Awesome!
I agree.. it would be nice to have a list of all the groups and one can tap to jump to a particular group.
Feeling pleased tonight as Apple seems to have fixed most of the iOS 17 bugs in iOS 17.1
I highly recommend anyone having issues with janky scrolling, black screens etc to update their OS. And please do send in bug reports if you still see issues !
Cheers :)
This is awesome, thank you! Where’s the best place for me to submit bug reports?
This threadsee the issue tracker in the app or at bottom of this topic body, or report directly through TestFlight if you run into a crash or something :)Hey, nice work!
I’ll echo the requests for a more dense version of the app. Also, my feed shows only posts with my unfiltered tags but AFAIK there is no way to view filtered posts which is a nice feature of Tildes.
How does this look in terms of a more compact feed?
Are people looking for even more compact than that?
Regarding the tags, like I mentioned I am still pretty new. Would you mind clueing me in to the filtering you’re referring to ?
Personally, that's still too large of a font for me. Here's a screenshot of the HN Hackers app, which I wish I could toggle the images on to make even smaller.
Sure thing, you can filter out tags from your feed via a settings page. This removes them from your feed, but creates a link to the filtered tag in your sidebar so you can still view them when you want to without having to edit your filtered tags.
Perfect feedback, thank you ! I’ll take that into mind.
I’ll add that functionality to the roadmap :) Thanks for explaining !
I think if the title font size was marginally smaller, that would be pretty close to perfect for me. But I’m a sample size of one. You could conceivably have what you have now, a “compact” setting that’s the example you posted, and “dense” that’s more akin to a Hacker News feed.
Yup, that’s probably how it’s gonna go. People love options ! My poor unit tests…
Having app dev nickname colored purple somehow made me nostalgic for Apollo even though it still has a couple of days left haha.
Awesome app, thank you!
I made this just because I knew how much I would miss Apollo next week…
Depending how modularly he built it, u/iamthatis could probably just switch Apollo to interface with Tildes/Lemmy/Everything and save me a whole lot of time 😆 I sure wouldn’t mind..
Much better than Backtick. Very clean presentation. Your account button/page is 👌
Can you make the new comment button bigger/easier to press? At the moment it’s on the left and I kinda use my right thumb for navigation.
Also why no option for Read Notifications to be reverted to Unread by swiping?
No problemo.
As far as I know, Tildes doesn’t support marking a notification as unread. Once it is read, it is read. (Someone can correct me if I am wrong :))
I could add local support for it, but it might get confusing because it would cause the website and app to be ‘out of sync’
AFAIK there is currently no way to mark previously read notifications as unread again. But I have added the feature request to Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/793
cc: @the9tail
My thought on the reply button would be to basically have the actual "Leave a comment" text centered, and expand the touch/hit/clickable/whatever area to the entire row down there instead of a specific button or clickable area within that row.
I was gonna do something like that, but upon further reflection I think I’m just going to bring the post reply field in-line. It will match the website better, and makes sense IMO.
I just wanted to say mad props for getting this built so quickly and for doing such a great job. I feel right at home using it, and I appreciate how you incorporated configurable gestures already too.
I really don’t have any other constructive feedback - just wanted to go out of my way to say thanks!
Thanks for the kind words :) If you run into any trouble or have any requests, do let me know ;)
I had 6 unread notifications and replied to one of them and the app crashed. Is there a way to check logs and see what happened ?
Uh oh !
When the app crashes, Testflight should offer to report the issue. If you do that, I’ll get a crash log.
I’m not logging much of anything right now, but it should give me a stack trace at least. If I need more details, I’ll have to add some more logging.
Sorry for the issue. It might be an obscure crash related to an environment object being missing. That one should be fixed in Build 14. Otherwise, well, i’ll have to check the logs 😄
Thanks for the report 🫶
Just downloaded and started using. Really liking it so far as it reminds me a lot of Apollo. You’ve done a great job with it so far and looking forwarding to seeing how you continue to improve it in the future.
Old post at this point, but I just wanted to say I've been using this since I jumped ship to Tildes and it's been great! Looking forward to future updates!
Is it possible to have a youtube link open the youtube app?
Absolutely it’s possible. I would love to.
I have in the plans a big update around links, to catch all links and present them in a more tappable preview; along with that part, I absolutely would like to include options for Youtube links to open in the app, Twitter too, etc.
Minor administrative note:
I’ve moved the issue tracker over to Sourcehut: https://todo.sr.ht/~tarrouye/Surfboard-Issue-Tracker
The existing links in the post / app should simply redirect there once everything propagates.
It’s not as user-friendly as the service I was trialing before, but much more affordable and it should do the trick for this project.
I’ve tried to include all existing requests on the new tracker. If you think I missed yours, or want to add some additional details to the new ticket I created for it, please feel free to add a comment or create a new issue !
Apologies for the inconvenience while it was down. Have a great weekend, folks.
If I feel up to it, might ship a small update to the app tonight. For now, off to take a nap :D
I accidentally double clicked on the vote button on a comment and it appears to act like I added two votes to the comment. I then started spam-tapping the vote and could get it to register up to three votes. Then clicking it again would jump between the original vote count and n-1 numbers randomly.
Thanks for the report. Added to the list.
The app feels quite polished! Good work!
I’m posting from the app. I REALLY like the design! Great start.
I love the visual cues you’ve taken from Apollo and the customizability of swipe actions, icons, etc. I also love that your roadmap is included in the Settings.
I understand the philosophy of the comment box at the bottom, but I still hate it. So I like where your reply button is. But I’m also one of those people that ninja edits comments and deletes comment drafts before posting.
💜💜
I already moved the comment button down :/
I didn’t feel too strongly either way because I don’t post top-level comments that often, and most people were asking for it to be moved so 🤷🏼♀️
EDIT: & I’m a repeat-editor too 😄
Just an incredible start. The app feels native, fast, and it looks incredible. I appreciate the customizable swipes. Great job.
Edit: OMG.. Fat fingered so much there.
Thanks for the kind words :)
Really liking the app so far! Can you add to the roadmap a “jump to next comment” button like Apollo had?
Added ! Thanks for checking it out 👍
(When you say next comment, I’m assuming you mean top-level comment / thread ? or do you mean within threads as well ?)
Yeah, definitely just the next top-level comment.
So….I may be missing it: where you post a brand-new post? For example, I was going to post a link to a CNN post related to the Supreme Court ruling on LGBT rights case, but can’t for the life of me find where to create a brand new post.
Thanks
You aren’t missing it, it’s not implemented yet. Sorry for the inconvenience !
I’ll get to it this weekend.
BTW you can check out the roadmap in the app settings to get an idea of what else is currently missing.
Thanks for giving it a try !
Oh gotcha. Thanks! You’re doing great with the app.
Do you have any plans on coding it so when you tap the topics button it scrolls you to the top of the page or refreshes your feed?
Yep, it’s on the list.
Feel free to give it a vote 👍
EDIT: This has shipped.
He doesn’t have that yet, but you can tap the top right (near battery) and it will go back to the top.
This one of my favorite features of Apollo!
I am really enjoying the app thus far. Apollo was one of my all time favorite iOS apps. Do you think it would be possible (or a good idea) to put the preview on the bottom of the post reply? Or maybe a way to disable it and just have the ability to see the preview in the text field where you type? Keep up the good work, excited to see where the app goes.
I played around with the positioning of all the elements a lot, and here’s my thinking: if you mean the in-line post reply, then maybe it would make sense and I might do it. For the popup reply sheet though, switching the order would be confusing IMO because you can’t type in the preview, and the input field should be closest to the keyboard.
That’s the ideal end-goal, just marking up the input field, a-la Apollo. It’s rather complex though, and the current system is functional, so that will come after a lot more groundwork is laid.
Thanks !
Very nice indeed. The best thing for me is the large selection of text sizes that go nice and big. I’ve been trialling some Lemmy apps recently and large text sizes are not frequent at the moment.
I just downloaded it and wow. I love it. It gives me the same iOS polish that was there with Apollo. I love the roadmap and so far just really enjoy it.
Full disclosure though, I am a very new tildes user lol
Not sure if this is something in the pipe, but on the website it's nice to be able to tell what comments have been added since you last visited the page using the left margin. It would be nice if there was a similar indicator for Surfboard, perhaps the comment is highlighted or marked with an icon if the margin is used to highlight threading.
This has now been added
Thanks for all the hard work and quick updates.
it might just be my opinion, but I find the giant new text a little too much, a small dot or a colour change would be more subtle.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll ponder some other options and throw something together. Dots or symbols seems reasonable 👍
It’s just my opinion! It the the orange colour comment symbol on the topic list is great and not too in your face.
Thanks so much OP. I hate using safari, and I find the PC experience janky.
As a MASS hider of stuff I’ve seen I hate manually doing it on the pc browser.
Thank you for your efforts. Enjoying Lemmy.world for my dumb dumb stuff (when it works) and now I can fully enjoy the more refined tildes ;)
edit: Yeah, an app is so much nicer than the PC. Lots of good visuals for new posts, hold-to-ignore (mmmm!). Really good shit man, well done.
Not sure if you saw my other comment here, but for Lemmy give https://wefwef.app a try. That dev has done amazing work !
Oh ya I’m rocking wef and memmy. Memmy just comes out on top, but they’re both veeery close.
👀 Hadn’t heard of Memmy, I’ll have to check it out. Thanks for mentioning it !
Edit: Darn, looks like their Testflight link is down. Might fork it later 😂
iirc, the App Store should publish the actual app soon, it's just in the 'awaiting' period. Shouldn't be long now hopefully!
Oh gotcha, wow that’s a quick turnaround for full App Store submission. I hope they’re prepared to deal with App Review when trying to push updates 😅
Nice, I’m on surfboard right now for iOS. This is pretty slick so far.
Thank you!
Just downloaded, beautiful app! The two app icons included are gorgeous. Interface is very nice and well laid out!
I appreciate the kind words :)
Currently responding from the app and I love it! Definitely see the Apollo inspiration but I love the UI as a whole. I do have one question though, how does “logging in” work on this app. I know there’s no Tildes API atm so I’m just curious how that works.
It works the same way that it does in your web browser. Surfboard just acts as a browser, & parses the page HTML to get the content. ‘Logging in’ is accomplished by storing a session cookie that authenticated you to the server.
Ah I see, thank you for responding! I've been trying to learn this stuff over the last few weeks so I appreciate the response. Good luck with the app, can't wait to see where it goes!
Not a crasher, but I did just notice the change app icon isn’t working for me. It says that the icon was changed but when I go back to the Home Screen it flashes back to the original.
I think it might be an iOS bug. I’ve seen it myself but I’ve reviewed the documentation for that functionality and I don’t see what I would be doing wrong.
If you reboot your device after changing it, it should stick consistently everywhere.
Thanks for checking it out !
I saw Widget on your roadmap and just throwing it out there how much I crave this. Just something that can show the top 1-3 threads on the front page in the rectangle widget and the top most in a square widget.
Secondly and unrelatedly - are you able to add an adjustable sensitivity setting for scrolling speed?
That’s the idea :) It’ll come later though, once the basics are more fleshed out.
If you mean while dragging it yourself, I’m actually not sure. I’ll have to look into it. Is that something you’ve seen another app do ? An example of the functionality you’re looking for would be useful.
If you mean when it is automatically scrolling itself (to a collapsed comment, for example), then yes I think I could.
this is great! Some hashed colors don't work so well in light mode. Its working well on 17.
Figures.. I might have to limit the selections more..
Thanks for the feedback
np. do you have a repo or anything where you'd like bugs and stuff?
The best way to submit feature requests & bug reports is to add it to the issue tracker and/or leave a comment on this thread and I’ll get around to adding it myself.
Thanks !
Dim read topics is turned on. Yet after I load a topic it doesn't dim it in the list. I even slowly scrolled through the comments to get to the bottom and it's still not dimming. I assumed it should dim when I open the topic.
Correct. I’m assuming those topics have new comments ? Dim read topics currently doesn’t dim topics if there are new comments, even if the topic had been read.
It’s currently not marking the new comments as seen when you open the post, which I will fix.
If you want a toggle for dim read posts to dim posts even if they have new comments, let me know.
Ya. Out on the front I think I can see what is a new comment count and a total comment count. Seeing that new count is good for me. If I open the topic I'd like to know I opened the topic.
So far it’s pretty awesome! The Tildes website is fine on PC but I appreciate the ability to have the community live in its own container on mobile rather than as a browser tab. Gestures improve the experience on a touchscreen an incredible amount.
Only “criticism,” and I’m not sure exactly how to remedy this - I’ve fat fingered the submit button while commenting multiple times that I had to immediately edit. Between trying to scroll the preview box and scroll the OP below it’s really easy to hit…maybe a settings toggle for clumsy dudes like me that turns on a post confirmation pop-up when you hit submit?
Fantastic work @earlsweatshirt - about the last thing I want to do after work is sit on my laptop more, and Surfboard definitely improves the mobile Tildes experience.
Request noted 👍
Thanks for checking it out
That confirmation option is now added (and on by default)
Happy internet surfing :)
Slick app! Nice work
A couple more items of feedback after using Surfboard for a couple more days:
Hi ! Both those items are planned for the future :)
Thanks for the feedback !
Suggestion:
When I expand a collapsed comment, the comment I’m expanding should stay put, and the thread should flow down from that location.
Currently, when I expand a comment, it jumps up to the top of the screen. This is very disorienting, it feels like your place in the thread is running away from you.
I would also appreciate this as well. The only time I would expect the app to navigate for me would be for following links to comments.
@streblo @guy please try the latest build, i spent way too much time reworking the comments collapsing and I sure hope it works properly now 😅
You’re right, it’s working correctly now, thanks!
Working great now, thank you!
Is there a way to collapse all child comments by default, or alternately a way to jump from one parent comment to the next in a thread?
I know you have a long roadmap, just curious if I’m missing something that’s already implemented.
Not yet, no.
Not specifically but I use the « collapse thread » for this. Unless I am missing what you meant 🤔
Hey, I just want to say a big thank you for this. I used apollo a lot and was hoping for an app experience a bit like it. This is perfect, I’ve been on tildes more and more recently but the lack of a nice app had kind of stopped me engaging. This is a lovely experience (replying from surfboard in TestFlight) so nice job!
Thanks for that :) I was also a heavy Apollo user, hence Surfboard. Now maybe in 10 years it’ll be as feature complete… 😭
Thank you for the app, the ui looks very clean and feels familiar as a former apollo user. I also haven’t run into any bugs.
Are there plans to port over some colorschemes such as gruvbox later on?
Theming is in the plans, and I’d like to include every theme from the website. It’s currently the most popular feature request.
I just wanted to say, this app is absolutely amazing.
I think I’ve found a minor bug:
When you use a tilde to automatically create a group link, (e.g. ~tildes) and then go back and edit the post the text gets replaced by a hyperlink which causes the group to display as an underlined hyperlink, e.g. here.
Hi, thanks for the report. It renders ok for me and the link correctly goes to ~test. Could you possibly include a photo of how it looks for you ? Thanks 🙏
Sorry, I should have clarified, the app is rendering it correctly. But it looks different on desktop.
Here's what it looks like on desktop.
I think the markdown parser is seeing a link and wrapping it in a link tag when it should just ignore it for groups.
Ah, I see. Thank you for the additional details ! I will definitely note it down.
Due to the way Surfboard fetches data (lack of an API -> HTML scraping), it receives it as a link. Then when editing, it will write it back as a link. I’ll have to add a specific check to strip the links for groups when editing. I imagine the same issue happens for user tags then 🤔.
It doesn’t seem to be causing any functional issues (clicking the link still opens the group on desktop and on mobile, in my tests), just the visual underline, so it might be a lower priority one. Depends how much effort it seems to be 😄
No problem, and not a big deal or anything, just FYI. ;)
Another small suggestion: when on the main Topics tab, if you click topics it would be nice if it could scroll back to the top and refresh. I seem to think Apollo had a similar action, since I keep doing it based on muscle memory.
Loving the app! Thanks for all of the great work so far!
That’s a popular feature request for sure. I’ll ship it tonight ;)
Marvelous! I’ve been getting a lot of use out of your work here and it’s filling the Apollo-sized hole, so I appreciate your wonderful contributions and work!
Can you add an option to hide vote counts in posts or comments?
This has been added :)
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/780
If you want that feature now, Tildes ReExtended already has it as an option:
https://gitlab.com/tildes-community/tildes-reextended
That’s where I got the inspiration from
Yeah, I’ll add it.
I haven’t noticed it while using and not sure if it is actually already built in, but could we get a new comment notification icon? Right now, I have to go to the account tab and refresh the page to get my notifications of a new reply to my comments or posts. Having maybe a badge pop up on account would be a nice addition.
There’s an option to have a badge for new notifications on the account tab; however, the app only explicitly checks for new notifications when it first starts. In keeping with general Tildes philosophy, if you want to see new notifications while still using the app, you have to manually check for them by refreshing the page.
I may add an option to refresh it on a certain interval, but I haven’t decided yet. Notifications should strike a (hard to achieve) balance between being useful and not driving addictive patterns, IMO.
Ahh gotcha. I will add, I have the notification badge turned on but I haven’t seen it working when I load up the app. For example, I loaded up the app just now and had no notifications. I went to the account tab and refreshed your response appeared with the badge now showing. Not sure if this was a case of the app running in the background or not but will be sure to force close the app this time and check again and update.
Thanks for the update.
It’s definitely possible that the app was still running (it doesn’t use much memory, so if you have a lot of RAM it can stay alive in the background for quite long); either way though, if you manually refreshed and had an unread notification the badge should have been showing if the setting is on.
The badge seems to be working alright for me but I’ll take a closer look this weekend when I get some more time to work on the project. Apologies for the inconvenience
Maybe I am missing it - but where do I click to unsubscribe from a tilde? Like I do not care for ~sports.baseball so I expected to click on the tilde press the … and hit unsubscribe but there was no option?
Hey, you weren’t missing it - that option didn’t exist previously. Groups support just shipped as part of a pretty big update. It will work exactly like you expected ;)
Replying from Surfboard - great job!
Is it possible to mark all notifications as read?
I woke up to a bunch of replies to one of my posts and read through the thread itself, but then still had the notifications. I had to click each one individually to mark them as read which was kind of a pain.
Not currently; I want to add it,
but probably need to see if there is such an option on the website itself. If the site only supports individual notifications, I’ll probably not have it for now, because I don’t love the idea of sending X requests to mark x notifications read.Edit: Will have it next build ;)
Does a get request to https://tildes.net/notifications/unread not clear all notifications? I think that's how it works on desktop?
I'll queue up a few replies on one of your test comments if you'd like to verify.
I don’t believe so. The app makes a GET request to that endpoint every time you refresh your notifications.
Unless there’s a user setting I haven’t seen, unread notifications work as such:
Voting, replying, bookmarking, or labeling the comment will mark the notification as read (on the website, this doesn’t visibly happen until you refresh the page after the action).
Clicking on the notification won’t mark it as read. (in the app, i’ve added an option for this, but i couldn’t find one on the website).
Reloading the page without marking the notification as read (explicitly, or implicitly via an action as above) will not see the notification marked as read.
Hmm, how it seems to work for me on desktop is that if I browse to https://tildes.net/notifications/unread, and then navigate back to https://tildes.net/ all my unread notifications become read.
Huh, interesting. Mine definitely doesn’t work like that.
Anyways, I saw there is a mark all read option, so I’ll get around to it this weekend 😄
Ahh, OK, it's apparently a setting: https://imgur.com/a/Z8N372a.
Good to hear there's an option that won't require any sort of strange hacks.
Ah, got it. Thanks for that !
Can you change the word “account” to your username to indicate when you are logged in?
I’ve been logged out by <don’t know what by> and I don’t notice I am until I try to do something.
I’ll take a note about the logout thing (either the browser cache cleared for some reason or the token expired, I guess - I’ll double check if I send the right request as if ‘keep me logged in’ was checked)
And feature request noted as well.
Thanks for the kind words. I’ve been pretty busy with other stuff lately but the next update should close a lot of the outstanding feature gap.
As far as a full release goes, we’ll see later down the line. For now, I appreciate the flexibility of Testflight in that I don’t need to go through App Review to ship updates.
Some kind of combined subscription that split the revenue between myself and Tildes is technically possible, but logistically it would be a nightmare, not to mention that everything on iOS has to go through Apple iAP and their 30%. Although it’s a little bit less user friendly, if you wanted to spend $10/mo that way you could do $5/mo on Github to both and feel even better knowing that all of your money is going to the people you want to support. This might be something I revisit down the line but revenue isn’t a primary concern for me (although I hope the app can encourage some people to become donaters to Tildes itself such that it stays sustainable)
Thanks, that’s very kind of you :)
You can also donate to Tildes on Github here:
https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
Both the Github sponsors and Patreon for Tildes are linked in the app :) If someone wants to donate to the experience, I’d prefer that Tildes is their first choice.
Looks great, any chance you want to make this (semi-) open source? I am an iOS engineer myself, and would love to contribute.
I realise this is a bit of an oldish topic at this moment, but only came across it just now.
Hey, thanks for asking. First of all, I appreciate the offer to help !
It’s something I’ve thought about a decent amount, but I’m still undecided. I’m a little jaded from having work taken and presented as others’. I’ve had open source work duped and sold on the App Store, or copied straight up with the only change being the author name at the top of the files. It’s frustrating - even if I release with a license that does allow it, so maybe I shouldn’t complain, I find it ethically questionable. Sometimes I’m ok with stuff like that, but sometimes I’d prefer people don’t do so.
There’s also the time cost of managing contributions, trying to ensure people aren’t working on the same issues at the same time, etc. I love open-source, and I contribute sometimes, but I’m not sure I have the time to manage an open source project currently.
…Sorry for the wall of text. TL;DR: Maybe. If you’re serious about wanting to contribute, maybe PM me - I’m much more open to setting up a private repo with a few vetted contributors than just putting it up publicly at the moment.
Edit: Welcome to Tildes, btw :)
Totally understand where you are coming from, I apppreciate your honesty and clarity on it.
I am serious about contributing meaningfully, without significantly increasing overhead. I like your suggestion to setup a private repo, but I wouldn’t want to overburden you if you feel the time is not right (yet?).
I’ll send you a pm with my github id, and some more details, and then leave it up to you to decide.
Thanks for being thoughtfull about this.
My TestFlight beta expired; is this affecting anyone else?
Yes
Instead of having the ribbon at the bottom that shows Topics, Search, Account, and Settings constantly, why not hide all that under a hamburger menu in the top left corner on the "homepage" (because presumably no one would be in any of those submenus while in a thread and the hamburger menu button could be replaced by the "< Tildes" button while in a thread)
Why ? Because I like tab bars :D
Each tab has its own navigation stack, which is nifty.
It lets you have multiple topics open at once, for example one from the feed, one from search, one from notifications….
For iPad I’ll probably do something more like what you’re saying, with a 3 column layout instead of a tab bar 🤔
I might think about it though :) Maybe as an option..
No worries, I'm just a single thread-ed kind of person! Looking forward to your future work on this (and a potential iPad focused app!!) it looks fantastic so far
I like how it is currently for all the reasons you mentioned! Looks great as it is.
Suggestion:
A setting to only show top-level comments by default when opening a thread.
This would also need to allow for the selective expanding of child comments in some way (clicking on top-level comment?)
@earlsweatshirt
Can you shoot me an invite to test your app in TestFlight? Looks like that is required before I can give Surfboard a whirl.
You don’t need an invite. First download the testflight app using the link provided up top and after that’s installed, click on the same link again to download surfboard. I was also prompted for a code initially but upon a subsequent try I was able to download it without issue.
Ah thank you, didn’t realize. That worked, got it!
Thanks for helping them out ;)
No problem, love the app! As a fellow Reddit/Apollo refugee, Thank YOU so much!
Is it me or is the issue tracker down for a couple of days now?
It is indeed and I haven’t had time to deal with it. Sorry about that. It’ll be back online by next Monday.
You’re doing great, buddy. Thanks for the hard work!
Nothing much to add. Personally, I don't understand much the idea of using an app to consume a web page, I think that navigating the site on the browser is a much nicer experience than having dedicated apps to different communities and the like. But that's me and I think I'm the minority. So, thanks for your effort, and I will give your app a try to see if I'm finally able to realize why so many people seems to prefer dedicated apps.
Can I be honest ? I really like Tildes’ website. I just missed my swipe gestures 😅
Those kinds of interactions are super tricky to pull off nicely on mobile web, IMO, or I’d have just looked at contributing there.
I’m not exactly a star web dev though
Also, it’d be nice if Tildes was a proper PWA so it could get rid of the browser chrome. Maybe I’m missing something there though.
Ah I love the inspiration drawn from Apollo and I love the little swipe features and especially tap to collapse.
I agree the tildes web page is nice but I have high hopes for this app. So thank you.
part of it is convenience, part of it is extension. Even on mobile, I really hate keeping more than 5-6 tabs open at once. But the way apps work make them easier to manage or simply be aware of. finding a browser tab is like an app inside an app.
Then for extension, that's more a product of how few options there are for customizing mobile webpages compared to desktop. I'm using someone's custom stylesheet on desktop Tildes to give a bit more space to comments/posts, and I can even create/download extensions if something I really want isn't available. But on mobile... extensions are a best a huge workaround to get working, and at worst simply don't work. So the best alternative is an app.
Aww I would have given it ago if it were available on Android too.
Judging by some of the comments I read so far, people seemed positive about your app.
This, but as I'm late to the show and not going to read all 213 comments, I'd like to throw in a vote to also put it on F-Droid when you do port it to Android?