a lot of design changes, not many new features

What's Changed

• impr: prefetch data from cached post feeds to display post pages instantly
• impr: sync post page changes to post feed
• impr: load initial post feed asynchronously to make sure people don't blame photon for the fact that the instance takes 81293578235792385 years to load the post feed
• fix: use /user endpoint for getting saved posts
• feat: improve image attachment prompt, allow inserting URL
• design: improve error containers & toasts
• design: allocate a bit more space for sidebars
• design: use secondary style buttons for post actions
• design: use a common list component
• design: make tab bars not look like actual human excrement
• design: better post consistency
• design: make menus 34.177825% more compact
• design: re-add description text to placeholders and also make them not look like actual human excrement
• design: move most community data to sidebar on desktop
• design: increase comment size on adequately sized screens to improve readability
• design: make pageination component not look like actual human excrement
• design: increase line height for markdown to improve readability
• design: make instances/federation page not boil your CPU and also make it not look like human excrement
• design: delay progress bar animation so that people think that the app is blazingly fast 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
• design: make sidebars not look like actual human excrement
• design: make settings page not look like actual human excrement
• fix: improve tab bar selected route detection
• i18n: remove flags from language names so my house doesn't get nuked from orbit for using a controversial or incorrect flag
• impr: switch menus to use Svelte attachment based event handling instead of a horrible, cursed, terrible, inaccessible, awful looking, web design violating, unreactive, garbage div wrapper
• impr: use a basic feature of every component library (components) for Fixate instead of duplicating the same thing 80x
• aria: improve semantics significantly for SEO and accessibility
• misc: add a default robots.txt
• impr: use a and for comment expansion so that it's actually CSS based and native instead of some javascript atrocity
• fix: context for comment links is wayy too tiny

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v2.0.1...v2.0.2

Piefed support next release!

Hi, first of all thank you for all the work you put into photon! I really love the interface and have been using it for many months now.

Today, I noticed that the Favorites folder disappeared, and I was wondering if this was intentional or a bug.

For what it's worth, I will mention that personally, I am a huge fan of ways that help customise our feed - consequently, I loved this folder.

No matter what, thank you for all the work on beautiful photon!

GitHub has always been generally a platform that doesn't align well with my and many peoples' values regarding open source software development, I only used it because it's the most popular.

Recent events regarding GitHub and its management have raised a greater consciousness about the nature of the service,so I was wondering if it would cause any problems for me to move to either:

• codeberg.org
• a selfhosted forgejo instance (git.phtn.app)

Or if everything is fine as is.

PieFed is growing fast, and some mobile apps like Voyager etc. now support it.

It would be great to have more desktop UI options like Photon.

Here are some relevant links for more info. The PieFed API sub: !piefed_api@piefed.social Introduction of App devs integrating PieFed into their apps

Will Photon support PieFed in the future?

Direct Link

This is a very big release since v1.31.4. If you've used phtn.app, you won't notice a difference, since that runs on the latest commit.

TL;DR

• Photon has been completely rewritten to use Svelte 5
• This brings significant performance improvements
• The UX has been changed to fit Photon's philosophy more closely
• Many issues have been resolved and bugs fixed
• 60% of changes are under the hood, but there's many visible ones too

What you'll notice

Snappier performance

• Svelte 5 optimizes a lot of the reactive parts of the app
• I've also spent a lot of time on a new virtualizer, which runs a lot faster

Design changes

• While the overall layout is relatively the same, I've reworked a lot of pages to fall more in line with my design philosophy.
• The design across (most) pages is much more consistent
• There's a new default theme
• Compact mode is now the default (if you've used photon before, this will not affect your setting)
• Comment layout is slightly different and more intuitive
• Modals now create a backstack so you can press the back button on your browser

New features and options

• More moderation features
  • Quickly view users'/submissions' moderation logs
  • View the users' votes n a post
  • Grouped reports for many reports on the same post
    • you can resolve many at once
• Options for more granular control over how links work in posts
• Option to reverse the action row
• Option to use absolute timestamps
• lemmy language tagging support
• Command palette now has contextual navigation options
• Contextual warnings for certain actions (like missing languages in posts)
• Messages page has been overhauled with markdown, contextual actions, etc
• Better view and options for modlog page
• Donation dialog as Lemmy requested

Optimizations

• Uses CSS animations more often which are faster
• Uses svelte context API to reduce prop drilling
• Navbar uses CSS rather than JS for positioning
• Uses optimized svelte $state rather than stores

Languages

Thanks to the community making translations on the Weblate, Photon has support for 18 languages!

• English (100%)
• Hebrew (58%)
• Arabic (33%) (fxomt)
• Bulgarian (72%) (salif)
• Chinese (Simplified) (91%) (qiancsf, CDN, binary3141)
• Chinese (Traditional) (21%) (binary3141)
• Dutch (81%) (qaz)
• Estonian (24%) (pewgar)
• Finnish (94%) (sevon)
• French (87%) (Blisterexe)
• German (64%) (poVoq, Tywele)
• Hungarian (55%) (myedition8)
• Japanese (84%) (Rentlar)
• Polish (83%) (gapetto)
• Portuguese (78%) (tmpod)
• Russian (83%) (WerySkok, mudkip)
• Spanish (81%) (acidrums4)
• Turkish (91%) (ikanat)

In the future

• Piefed support is targeting v2.2.0
  • With the way it is being written, Mastodon support may as well come sometime around v3.0.0

There's a lot more in this release, as well as more to come. I'm trying to make Photon closer to its design philosophy, which can be summarized as:

It should not take more than 3 seconds to identify an action you wish to perform within a given container or page.

This covers a lot of reasons why I design stuff the way I do, for example, you'll never find more than 5 buttons (minus links) in a single container. Additionally, specific types of actions will usually look different, like primary actions on a page versus sub actions.

I hope you enjoy this release!

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v1.31.4...v2.0.0

Photon is two years old now! (I missed the birthday which was 2 weeks ago. :< )

I've done these posts a few times during Photon's early days, and they've been helpful.

2.0 is almost out, I'm done with pretty much everything and it's stable enough. There's bug fixes in here that make it arguably more stable than the current "stable" release.

I ended up with a bit of a "RobTop and 2.2" situation working on this update.

if you're on phtn.app you're always on the latest commit, and if you're using lemdro.id, p.lemmy.world, or photon.slrpnk.net, you're on the latest 2.0 beta.

Ill make a big release note once it's out, but for now:

Are there any new features that you'd like?

Currently planned is:

• Piefed support (targeting v2.2.0)

Can't see my comment history... Using phtn.app

There has been a change to how the submission page works under profile. I used to see posts and comments one the same page, now it's separate and it needs an extra click to see my comments. I would love to have a setting where I can choose how to display that content: posts, comments, or both - and Photon would remember the setting. It's not a big thing, just a convenience and for my use case a regression to how it worked before.

That said, I love Photon. Thank you for your great work.

Sometime recently, the page that shows while the content is loading got changed to have a dark color theme, even on light mode. This is slightly surprising for my eyes every time I click on a button to get a flash of dark and then light.

In the window that pops up when replying to someone, the viewport that shows the original comment is obscured if it exceeds the size of the container that it's in. There is a sort of fade away effect towards the bottom, which is fine, but the problem is that there doesn't appear to be any way to scroll or expand the comment to view the full size.

Picture attached for reference:

I am currently working on alpha PieFed support for Photon.

The PieFed API is missing a lot of features from native PieFed, so not all functionality you'd expect will work (notably, the inbox.) I can't do anything about this until those features are added to the API.

The way I'm writing this will also allow Mastodon support in the future.

Status

I've already implemented basically the entire AVAILABLE PieFed API. You can try a beta here.

You can view my progress at via the pull request on GitHub.

Hello! As the piefed API has been released a week or so ago, i'm wondering of photon will ever support it? The APIs are very similar, so it would not need much modification to get it working.

For reference:

Tesseract, mlem, voyager and thunder are all interested in getting piefed support soon. Interstellar already supports it.

Tons of huge instances have decided to run a piefed instance, too:

• piefed.blahaj.zone
• piefed.world
• piefed.ca
• quokk.au
• slrpnk.net (potentially, in the future)
• dbzer0.com (potentially, in the future)

Thanks in advance!

see spoiler-formatted section in the post for a more detailed image altough its the same source.

looks like some images are lower resolution over photon than over other frontends for no reason. It bothered me so much, looks like its only this frontend, isnt it?

is there a way to use photon differently to get full res because clicking the download icon (open in new tab) doesnt do it neither.

Will this be fixed?

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/12010107

full res, somehow image posts are always for ants

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20608572

Anyone else running into this issue?

I was seeing downvotes of hundreds of thousands and in some case even millions. But that's not the case when I log in from the standard Lemmy UI. (See left of picture) Also, tens of thousands of dollars are being solicited from the app (see right) Finally, some odd spam posts appear only via this app (middle right).

I don't know if this app is abandoned, but to the users: be warned. I've switched to alexandrite.app out of safety concerns.

Upon going back to the feed page from a post page, the feed tends to load in at a different point (higher up) than where it was before. This results in a lot of repetitive scrolling.

Also, I noticed that (when new content is being loaded in?) the scrolling gets stuck in the same spot. Scrolling kind of just glitches on the same spot until it gets past it and then resumes as normal.

Hey, I noticed that the expand/collapse button tends to block text sometimes. Is there any way that it could be made transparent when hovering the mouse over it? Also, the hover text should say 'collapse' when the text has already been expanded.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/9414466

See big red box on image attached (collapse as in the feature on reddit)

There is also a container feature already. I marked it at the bottom of attached image with a smaller red box