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Memmy - An iOS client for Lemmy @lemmy.ml

2y ago

Hello from Memmy!

Howdy all! Hopefully you are doing well.

It has been quite some time since the last update, and for that I do apologize. Both personal commitments and just the need to take a step back have had both Sean and I not really working much on the app. However, here is some news from Memmy.

The initial releases of Memmy taught me a lot about React Native. Making an app this feature filled is fairly difficult, and it grew quickly and fell apart in a lot of areas. Seeing all of those short comings, I have gone ahead and addressed them from the ground up.

The number one issue was the UI framework that was in use. Somehow, the arguably most used UI framework for React Native had exceptionally terrible performance. That has now been completely removed from Memmy. What we are working with now produces renders in within 2ms of base React Native components.

Additionally, the state has been completely reworked. No longer should there be any real issues there. I’ve taken care to try and make sure there is only one source of truth for posts and comments as well as making sure proper memoization is being used.

Swipe gestures can be fully customized now, so feel free to do whatever setup you want.

I have some code ready to test for push notifications again. Originally, I disabled them because of rate limit issues at the request of Lemmy.world. I’ll make sure I’m still in the clear, but I was given some numbers to work with before that I think will work fine.

The community drawer can be opened from anywhere in the app by pressing and holding on the home icon now. Double tapping will refresh the feed. Small stuff, but highly requested.

Drafts get stored for everything. You can start replying to a comment, close out and reply to another one, then go back to the first. Your changes will be waiting for you.

There are other changes all over the place that should really just make performance light years better. There are sleek animations now as well on community and profile views, and loading is no longer “jarring”. Animations and fade ins are used throughout the app for all loading of data.

There’s some more stuff to implement but I anticipate having something up on the store by the middle of next week. I’ve submitted something to TestFlight for approval already, so if you are still in there you can download that.

I should note that there are no plans at all to monetize Memmy. No advertisements, paywalls for features, etc. frankly, I am happy to bite the small bill for push notifications if it comes to it. The intention is just to make an environment that you all can easily use.

Feel free to come back to memmy if you left, or stay where you’re at. As long as you’re happily using Lemmy in general that’s all that really matters :)

Cheers!

68 comments

Thanks for your hard work and willing to stay at it. Memmy is, and will remain, my top choice!
- Thank you :) you won’t be let down for your patience!

Big news! That’s great to hear and I can’t wait to try it out. React Native is such a minefield!
- It’s absolutely wonderful but a massive headache at the same time. Honestly, had I had more react experience in general before, things wouldn’t have been so bad. All my react experience before memmy mainly came from when class based components were still the norm!
  Alas I’m just a backend dev by trade so moving to front end stuff was a bit difficult!

Thanks for all your work on this! I was so happy to see a new update for Memmy this morning! Great way to start the day.
- Of course :) glad to be back and working on it. It was a good break from things, but it was a good bit longer than expected just due to some other commitments I had as well. Really excited to get this new and - frankly amazing - new update out in full.
  
  Is there a means to privately donate to Memmy development/tipjar or anything?

Oh, fantastic! Glad you used some of the quiet time to get some work done without us all breathing down your neck lol.
I've still been kicking around on TestFlight, both out of laziness in not wanting to test and find something else, and hopes you might return, so this is wonderful news!
- Thanks for hanging in there. The wait will be worth it :)

Awesome news! (Posted from Memmy)
- Same tbh

Thank you for working on this great app! Unfortunately, it looks like 1.0 has some big wrinkles to iron out. Here is what I experienced:
I lost all my settings. I had to log back in, then try to put my settings back to how they were.
Many items in settings are non functional. Off the top of my head, most of the problems were on the link items under settings, such as all the stuff in “about”. Other settings I noticed aren’t working were Allow NSFW and Blur NSFW. These can no longer be toggled; both toggles immediately revert to off when you press them.
I can’t find a way to add a second account. If I hold down on my account icon at the bottom like I could do in 0.6.0, nothing comes up.
This was on 1.0(21). I reverted to 1.0(20) to see if things were working there. My login and settings I set in 1.0(21) stuck, but the other issues persisted. Reverting to 0.6.0(2) still functions, with my accounts still in place.
- It is on TestFlight for a reason. It is not a finished product.
  Settings are cleared because of a new system of storing the settings.
  I am implementing all of those settings. Please be patient.
  
  I should say too that if those features are important to you (which is understandable) give me another week.

Man don’t feel bad for taking a break. When I first got memmy not only did you have an update like every two days but you fixed like every bug that was making memmy annoying to use in like a month. You deserve that break man haha

How do you enable compact mode now? Happy to see that the default sorting bug was fixed!
- I’ll throw it in there soon. Was mainly focused on making sure each of the original functions is available then going to do a lot of attention to detail on design. Compact was always something that bothered me both in terms of performance and design, so I want to make sure it is done right.
  
  Pls do! Cards just don't sit right with me and I'd love to see this return so I can ditch reddit. I can do that now but eh I'm weak.
  
  Thank you for the clarification and your hard work! Like others I prefer compact (strongly), so I've rolled back to 0.6 for now but will check back once it's available in 1.0.

Memmy is still my daily app for my beehaw account. Yeah it has a few little idiosyncrasies, but honestly it’s very well done and intuitive. I’m excited you’ll be doing more work on it, and you can bet I’ll be sticking around. Thank you for all of your hard work.

Thanks for the update. I really like Memmy, but I stopped using it because the preview of the photo is cropped. It makes it so I need to click onto an image to read the text and I’d like to just keep scrolling.
Is there an option to tell it not to crop the images in the preview?
I’m not even sure that made sense 😅
- I’ve fixed a bunch of stuff there. Hopefully with a few more tweaks it will be wonderful.
  
  Thanks! I’ll jump back into it 😁🙏

Is there any idea of when this version will be available?
- Post says middle of next week, sooner if you’re on TestFlight though it’s not showing up there for me yet.

I’m going to say something unpopular: I think you should make it possible for users to pay you for premium features like notifications.
Writing software is a hard thankless job. I’m sure there are many in the community who’d like to help you so that you can be more recharged and sustained in your pursuit to make Memmy better.
It’s admirable you want to keep it free, I hope there’s always a great free version. But I think you should consider a premium route, for features which actually do cost money to operate, and make a few bucks out of it too.

This is awesome news! Thanks for all your hardwork!
Just a quick question. Will the new update make changes to landscape mode? It’s a little buggy.
- Oh yes, it is much better. The glitchiness was caused by the slow rendering from that horrible framework. It’s ridiculously better now 👍

Thanks for the hard work! Looking forward to it. I've tried the other iOS apps, but I keep coming back to Memmy despite the bugs. Sounds like you may have already fixed my issues :)
- Hopefully with far fewer bugs now :) thanks!

Welcome back! Seems like a great base to build off of.
Great attitude too. 😊
- Thanks! Glad to be back at it.

Thank you for your hard work! Is there a new Test Flight code? I don't see the new version yet.
- I received a notification from TestFlight about Memmy, but I can’t recall exactly what it said. I assumed it said a new version is available so I installed it per that, but now that I’m looking in the TestFlight app, it’s showing the app expires in 22 days, so I don’t think it was a full new version. Maybe a revision? But to answer your question, I haven’t heard anything about a new code being needed.
  
  It should be available as 1.0 and should say 90/89 days remaining. Did you refresh the screen? Sometimes it gets stuck on the old version.

I went into TestFlight to see if any of my apps had been updated and when I was greeted with a Memmy update, I literally jumped out of my seat.
It really feels like Memmy has matured and grown. Sure, it might need some more polish, but that’s expected for such a massive rework.
I’m really excited to see what’s next!

Actually been really enjoying the app tbh, it’s made the transition from Reddit pretty seamless imo. Glad to see you’re still on the case!

Glad to hear you’re back!

Maybe not a popular opinion but I wouldn’t mind if y’all do the Bean and Avelon $30 lifetime. I’d pay it.

I’ve been really enjoying the app again. More importantly, I hope you’re enjoying life a bit as well.
Minor thought, so minor that I’m commenting here instead of on GitHub, I would love the option to disable the snappy new animations.
I find it very unnatural for the rate of scrolling to change mid-scroll. That is, when scrolling a community or my profile, the scroll motion goes super fast and then slows back down. For me, this feels a lot like going up a staircase with different height steps.
- This should be a lot better now!
  
  Yeah it is! Glad I wasn’t alone with how that felt. The community logo shrinks while reducing the banner works just fine for me UX-wise.
  Cheers
- I have something to fix the scroll issue. Was annoying me too. But if it' still something people don't like we can add a way to disable it.

Glad to hear this! I'm excited to see where Memmy is going! It was the app that got me hooked, after all.

Thank you for continuing work on Memmy, and especially bringing back Compact view!
May I ask/suggest an option to once again show the poster's name in Compact View? I really got used to seeing that information back in Apollo and the earlier Memmy versions. Perhaps this could be a toggle along with user/community instance names?
- Sure thing. I’m doing some stuff in there right now so I’ll toss it in.
  
  Wow, thank you!

Thanks for the update! I’m glad to see development continue.
The performance is way better on my iPhone 7.
Look forward to more updates!
- You were not lying! Just played around with it on my iPhone X and it’s 🧈

Hiya :) Are the push notifications on the table in terms of getting that sorted out? Every time I try, it basically freezes until I close app and when I reopen (forcefully) its back to toggled being off in the account settings thing
- Yep, they will be fixed up here in the next week or so.

68 comments