Spyke

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arctic

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Arctic beta has expired

My pleasure! I’m not exactly sure what is going on here, I submitted a new build to TestFlight 2 days ago, and it’s still waiting for review. I’ve always had really good luck with the review processes and it’s usually approved within an hour or so even with AppStore releases. I’m hoping it’ll be approved sometime today since the weekend is over.

I was really pushing to have the update ready before this happened, but I was not expecting such a long wait for review.

Anyway as others have pointed out, you can switch to the AppStore version without loosing any settings. Keep your eye out, I’ll be posting here when the new TestFlight version is live.

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*Permanently Deleted*

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My app Arctic falls into the free, closed source, privacy respecting category. I see what your going for as far as a direction for the community, but it is limiting for apps such as mine. Just because software is free, and doesn’t track its users does not necessarily mean it needs to be open source. Closed source software also does not equate to being nefarious or tracking users.

I’m a big fan of FOSS, and am working towards open sourcing components of Arctic, but I haven’t decided whether I want to fully open source the project.

What I’d prefer to see is requirements for post formatting. So all submissions need to include information about the client

  • pricing (free) (paid) (freemium) (IAP)
  • source (closed-source) (open-source)
  • tracking (ads) (crashlitics) (anonymous) (etc)
  • platforms (web) (windows) (linux) (iOS) (android) (cross)

I’m a fan of this community because it is the only one I’ve found that is targeted specifically at providing information about lemmy clients, and with the proposed changes, I see that information becoming more fragmented. I’d rather see changes along the lines of what I suggested, or similar, and then maybe a new community could be born (FOSSLemmyApps) which could be advertised in a stickied post here, and included in the sidebar.

Ultimately, it is up to you as the moderator, but I do hope you’ll consider feedback from the existing subscribers. Perhaps an open discussion, or a poll would be good for getting feedback about the proposed changes.

arctic

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When FOSS?

Open source is absolutely in the roadmap for Arctic.

Arctic is 100% free and always will be, there are no paid or premium features. In app purchases are solely for the purpose of supporting development, and ongoing server costs for push notifications.

Why is Arctic closed source? Well, Arctic started out as a small personal project for myself. I did not have any idea the project would grow so big. I did not choose the best architecture for the project (MVC) and over time its become a bit unruly. I do not want to open source the project in its current state. I’m working on migrating to MVVM which will vastly improve readability, and overall code quality.

I’ve also been working on modularizing a lot of the larger components of Arctic into packages in an effort to clean up the core project. The project is built using UIKit instead of SwiftUI, thus the custom UI components such as the Markdown rendering system are cumbersome and complicated. Moving components such as this out of the core project into manageable dependencies is a major step towards open sourcing. Of course, all these packages will be open sourced along the way.

In the end, what I may end up doing is similar to mlem. Starting the project fresh, open source from the start, and based on a more sustainable pattern. I’ve leaned a ton while working on Arctic, and I have a much more concise view of the end product I want to build now. I think this would actually be an easier feat than refactoring the entire project. All that has been stopping me from doing so, is it would force Arctic to take several steps backwards in order to move forward.

Anyway, yes I am working to open source Arctic, and I am very excited to do so. I’m still working out the details on how I want to achieve this step.

arctic

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Is the TestFlight version going to be updated or renewed?

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It’s not abandoned. I had a very busy summer and did not have much time to work on it. I’m back at it now and I have a couple big updates coming over the next few weeks. Things should start picking up around here again. I plan to get back to weekly updates, I also have some time off from work next month so updates may be more frequent during that time.

arctic

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Multi-Communities!

Thank you! This is something I’d been holding out for a while now waiting to see if it’d be implemented in the Lemmy API. I finally decided to roll my own solution in the meantime.

There are a couple of issues with sorting, for instance Scaled and New Comments sort modes are not accurate in multi-communities. This is due to limitations in the API where I don’t have access to the necessary information to accurately implement the sorting algorithms client side. However, the pages are still fetched from the API using the proper sort mode, so all the same posts will be present in the per-page feed, the sorting just won’t be quite as accurate.

Other than that, I am not aware of any other issues. Though this is new and I only tested it for a few hours before releasing the update. I do think I will add an option to the editor so that multi-communities can be linked to accounts. This will allow setting multi-communities for a single, or multiple accounts. I may do the same for favorite communities as well.