cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18159531
UPDATE! Fewer than 15% of Lemmy Apps display posts accurately
Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this.
An Apps Experiment
Introduction
This is an experiment I performed out of curiosity, and I have a few big disclaimers at the bottom. Basically, I've seen a lot of comments recently about one app or another not displaying something right. Lemmy has been around for a while now and can no longer be considered an experimental platform.
Lemmy and the apps that people use to access the platform have become an important part of people’s lives. Whether you are checking the app weekly or daily, and whether you use it to stay up on the news or to stay connected to your hobby, it’s important that it works. I hope that this helps people to see the extent of the challenge, and encourages developers to improve their apps, too.
How I did it
I wanted to investigate objectively how accurately each app displays text of posts and comments using the standard Lemmy markdown. Markdown is a standard part of the Lemmy platform, but not all apps handle it the same. It is basically what gives text useful formatting.
I used the latest release of each app, but did not include pre-releases. I only included apps that have released an update in the last 6 months, which should include most apps in active development.
I was unable to test iOS-exclusive apps, so they are not included either. In all, 16 apps met the inclusion criteria.I also added Eternity, which is in active development, although it has not had a recent update. I was able to include several iOS apps thanks to testing from @jordanlund@lemmy.world – Thanks, Jordan! This made for 21 apps that were tested.
Each app was rated in 5 categories: Text, Format, Spoilers, Links, and Images. I chose these mostly based on the wonderful Markdown Guide from @marvin@sffa.community, which was posted about a year ago in !meta@sffa.community (here).
I checked whether each app correctly displayed each category, then took the overall average. Each category was weighted equally. Text includes italic, bold, strong, strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. Format includes block quotes, lists, code (block and inline), tables, and dividers. Spoilers includes display of hidden, expandable spoilers. Links includes external links, username links, and community links. Images included embedded images, image references, and inline images.
Thanks to input from others, I also added a test to see if lemmy hyperlinks opened in-app. There was a problem with using the SFFA Community Guide that caused some apps to be essentially penalized twice because there was formatting inside formatting, so I created this TEST POST to more clearly and fairly measure each app.
In each case, I checked whether the display was correct based on the rules for Lemmy Markdown, and consistent with the author’s intent. In cases where the app recognized the tag correctly but did not display it accurately, that was treated as a fail.
Results
Out of a possible perfect 10, only 3 apps displayed all markdown correctly:
Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0
Alexandrite - 10.0
Voyager - 10.0
Summit - 9.7
Photon - 9.3
Arctic - 9.3 (pending)
Interstellar - 9.1
Lemmy-UI - 9.0
Thunder - 8.9
Tesseract - 8.6
Quiblr - 8.1
mlmym - 8.0
Lemmios - 8.0 (pending)
Mlem - 7.5 (pending)
Boost - 7.3
Eternity - 7.0
Sync - 6.9
Connect - 6.7
Lemmynade - 6.1
Avelon - 5.7 (pending)
::: spoiler Disclaimers
Disclaimers
I Love Lemmy Apps (and their devs)
Lemmy apps devs work very hard, and invest a lot in the platform. Lemmy is better because they are doing the work that they do. Like, a LOT better. Everyone who uses the platform has to access it through one app or another. Apps are the face of the entire platform. Whether an app is a FOSS passion project, underwritten by a grant, or generating income through sales or ads, no one is getting rich by making their app. It is for the benefit of the community.
This is not meant to be a rating of the quality or functionality of any app. An app may have a high rating here but be missing other features that users want, or users may love an app that has a lower rating. This is just about how well apps handle markdown.
This is pretty unscientific
You’ll see my methodology above. I’m not a scientist. There is probably a much better way to do this, and I probably have biases in terms of how I went about it. I think it’s interesting and probably has some valuable information. If you think it’s interesting, let me know. If you think of a better way, PM me and I’d be happy to share what I have so you don’t have to start from scratch.
My only goal is to help the community
I do think that accurately displaying markdown should be a standard expectation of a finished app. I hope that devs use this as an opportunity to shore up the areas that are lagging, and that they have a set of standards to aim for.
I don’t have any Apple things
Sorry. This is just Android and Web review. If someone would like to see how iOS apps are doing, please reach out and I’ll share how we can work together to include them.:::
Thought that if we are so easily bored in our modern society, much more than were our grandparents for example, it's because of technology that simplify all our daily activities. When it was necessary to do the laundry in a basin, it took a lot more time than just pushing on a button to launch the washing machine, then there was no time for boredom. What do you think?
As almost every readers, I have some favorite authors from which I like to read everything they publish. But I wonder how I can efficiently "follow" their publication. Do you know about a service (free, at least as in free beer, at best from the foss world)which can offer such syndication? I'm thinking about a personalized rss feed, or a e-mail, or any way. For the moment, I just look from time to time to their website or social media page but the issues I have are:
Based on the awesome job of WFH@lemm.ee documenting the stuff and applying it to solarized, I tried to do the same with my vim favorite theme: everforest. It's far from perfect (I'm not at all a designer), feel free to improve your way (and share updates in comments). The zinc theme is probably more refined because I use only this one, I tried to make slate match the palette but as I'm not using it it's more difficult.
A screenshot:
{
"other": {
"white": "#FDF6E3",
"black": "#002b36"
},
"primary": {
"100": "#A7C080",
"900": "#8DA101"
},
"zinc": {
"50": "#D3C6AA",
"100": "#A7C080",
"200": "#DBBC7F",
"300": "#D3C6AA",
"400": "#D3C6AA",
"500": "#D3C6AA",
"600": "#4F585E",
"700": "#4F585E",
"800": "#425047",
"900": "#232A2E",
"925": "#2D353B",
"950": "#2D353B"
},
"slate": {
"25": "#FDF6E3",
"50": "#FDF6E3",
"100": "#EFEBD4",
"200": "#E0DCC7",
"300": "#E0DCC7",
"400": "#D3C6AA",
"500": "#5C6A72",
"600": "#5C6A72",
"700": "#5C6A72",
"800": "#5C6A72",
"900": "#8DA101",
"950": "#8DA101"
}
}
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXAjMlTO7Dc
Enjoy this wordy trip around the UK! Go to https://ground.news/robwords to see diverse perspectives and discover how language shapes narratives. Subscribe th...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXAjMlTO7Dc
Enjoy this wordy trip around the UK! Go to https://ground.news/robwords to see diverse perspectives and discover how language shapes narratives. Subscribe th...
Ok let's give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I'm a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write "good" code, readable and so.
However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don't sleep at night because of this.
I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.
For now, I'm not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I'm sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive...
Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.
I want to get started with home automation, probably based on a raspberry pi (or as of now with my banana pi which is my home server) and either openHAB or home assistant. My goal is, first, to put some temperature/humidity sensors in varous rooms and leak detector in my basement where I had some issues with the main drain. I wonder if you have some recomendations for a usb dongle for zigbee and/or z-wave compatible with linux, not too expensive but good enough if I want to extend the network later. I read about SONOFF-ZB USB Dongle Plus Zigbee 3.0 available on Chinese websites. What do you think?
@fievel
@lemm.ee