Hey all!

Saw some chatter across the community and just wanted to give an update of where things are.

It's been a busy summer with vacations, work and the craziness that comes along with it. I personally had 2 new additions to my family (twins!) and was on parental leave for a bit then figuring out the new work routine with the additional kiddos!

All that being said things are starting to stabilize for me and I'm getting back into the swing of Liftoff development. I have a laundry list of items I plan to tackle during the long weekend in the US:

• Move through the backlog of open PRs and get those merged
• Look into the unwarranted post view refresh that I've seen reported
• Triage the GitHub issues list
• Sluggish FPS

Additionally we're actively discussing larger user experiences that we're thinking about changing, specifically multi instance and cross instance account handling. You can track that discussion and please contribute your thoughts here:

https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/issues/251

Thanks for using the app, and thanks for being an active community. Excited for what's to come!

As always please join us on matrix!

For those of you wondering what all the fuss is about, here's a quick introduction to the app.

Yes, it’s yet another app for Lemmy, but based heavily on the mature but now abandoned Lemmur project, with a few updates to make it run with the current API and some minor changes to the UI.

Written in Flutter, so it is very multi-platform. We currently have builds available for testing for Android and iOS (also running on iPad and Macs [Apple Silicon only for the moment]). Brave souls can try building it for Linux or Windows and report back on their experiences!

Preview it on iOS at TestFlight or on Android at GitHub.

The source is released under GPL 2.0 and is available at GitHub for inspection, download, build, issue logging and contributions, so go and get it!

Features:

• Fully featured for end users: posting and commenting fully complete.
• Sorting and UI customisation options.
• Light Mode, Dark Mode, System Mode.
• Multiple accounts on multiple servers.
• Bookmark your favourite posts and comments.
• Localisation (work in progress).
• Full search support (posts, comments, users, communities).
• Support for direct messaging.

And here's a few screenshots:

Gorgeous Card view

Compact view

Settings

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Built for Android (not released yet)

Runs on iPad and Mac (in TestFlight)

Sorry.

It doesn't matter which instance I put in it just gives me a red X and an error. I noticed it wasn't last updated until July 2023 does this app still even work anymore am I doing something wrong? Any help would be appreciated thank you very much for your time.

I was fine with the app as it was, but it appears now there needs to be a small fix

Anyone else having trouble logging back in after Lemmy.world's last server update? It just spins forever after I click Sign In, doesn't even give me an error.

This goes to anyone like me who's still using this app

Liftoff doesn't have anything that deletes old data from cache, which means with time it will take up a good amount of storage, so we have to clear it manually every once in a while

You probably already know how by now but if you don't:

settings app > apps > liftoff > clear cache
or long press liftoff icon > app info > clear cache

The clear cache button might be hidden behind a storage or data submenu.

I think I was around 850MB this time, so y'all are probably around 1GB

Let's keep coping that liftoff is still maintained even though the last commit was in July.

Btw I don't care that someone else usually does this, I'm bored.

Now that 0.19 is in testing on a couple of servers we're faced with the reality that Liftoff is probably not going to be functional for much longer. So I'm curious what everyone's got planned.

Personally I've got my eye on !raccoonforlemmy@lemmy.world which is currently under development but looks like it might be the closest to my ideal. Developer describes it thusly:

I liked the feature richness of Liftoff (e.g. the possibility to explore all the communities of an external instance), the multi-community feature of Summit and the polished UI of Thunder and I wished I could have them all in the same app.

It's currently very promising, but also very buggy so I'm hopeful it might be in a more usable state by the time 0.19 starts majorly rolling out. We shall see. The dev put out a call for testers a couple days ago but I'm sure more wouldn't hurt if anyone wants to give it a whirl.

I've tried most of the main Android options by this point, Summit gets the most use just because of multi-communities (great for sports and other happening-right-now events) but I'm really not a fan of its interface.

Boost looks nice and simple, but I find a lot of the features to be just straight-up broken.

Sync and Eternity both put me off with their looks even though they look totally different to each other!

Connect would probably be my second choice so far, but I'd still need to keep Summit around for the multi-communities which is a bit annoying.

That's about the extent of my investigations at this point. Would love to hear which you've tried and what you like / dislike from the point of view of a Liftoff user. Let's get some recommendations ironed out before everything breaks and this group is overrun with people asking why 😅

Whenever I try and go to this instance it shows that an unexpected error has occurred. What's the dealio?

The website itself appears to work.