This is great feedback. Honestly I’ve been primarily focused on integrating features so far. In the next couple of releases I plan to go through and focus on refining the UI making it more readable, reactive, and customizable.

I hadn’t really considered adding a jump button, but I can absolutely look into that as an option. I might even see if I can fit that in the next release, as it should be quite simple to implement.

As for open sourcing, I have not decided just yet. I would prefer open source, but I need to put some more thought into it before I make a decision.

Free, yes. Open Source, not as of now. I just haven’t decided yet if I’ll be open sourcing the project or not.

Thank you! I don’t have a firm release date just yet, though I am pushing for a release date sometime at the end of October. This is largely dependent on how much I can get done in that timeframe, so this could change.

That’s great, glad your liking it so far! I definitely plan on adding a lot more customization options going forward. Right now there is not much in terms of customization, I’ve primarily been focusing on making sure all the core features of Lemmy are supported before transitioning to appearance settings.

Arctic is at a point now where virtually everything except for Admin tools are supported, so I am planning to start adding more customization options, and detail adjustments in the next couple of releases. I try to push at least one update a week with new features and fixes.

I’m always open to suggestions so if you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to ask.

Great question! No information is provided by TestFlight to the developer by joining a test group. When submitting feedback such as crash reports, or screenshots, then only anonymous device information is provided such as iOS version, device type, connection type, time zone, battery level, free disk space, and screen size. Optionally users can also provide their email address when submitting feedback so the developer can contact them, but this is not required.

There are also private TestFlight groups where you need to share your email with the developer so they can specifically add you to the test group, but that is the only difference between private and public groups.

So you can rest easy, you’ve not been sharing any information just by joining a public TestFlight.

Here is a shameless plug for my own Lemmy app Arctic. It’s a fully native pure Swift based app built with performance and content presentation in mind. It’s packed full of features, and more are being added all the time.

More information is available over at !arctic@lemmy.world

Wow, thank you so much. I’m glad you’re enjoying it.

I keep trying out SwiftUI every year or 2 since it came out, and I’m always disappointed by the limitations. It definitely has some good use cases, but it’s years behind UIKit and it would be too much of a trade-off to switch to SwiftUI fully.

I am planning to use it in a few places in the Arctic such as a Markdown renderer in some areas like the full post view. I’ve put a lot of work into the markdown builder in Arctic and ultimately it’s still bound by the limitations of AttributedStrings. I think it would be a lot easier to split the elements into separate views using SwiftUI. For instance: block quotes, in-line images, in-line link previews, html blocks, animated images/videos

However, I have a few things I want to try to improve my current renderer before switching to SwiftUI for this. It’s based on the same approach as the SwiftUI version, but I’ll be building the view hierarchy using UIKit.

Anywho, thanks for the feedback. Rest assured Arctic will remain a UIKit based app, it just may have some SwiftUI sprinkled in where applicable.

Thank you! The performance is still a work in progress, always more to improve on.

Thank you so much! Glad you’re enjoying it.