I just wanted to post a little update on Arctic’ development. I’m a little bit behind on my original release target. I moved to a new house last week, and have been busy with the logistics of that. I also encountered some performance issues with Arctic that took some time to resolve.

Arctic is finally reaching my original MVP (minimum viable product) goals and should be able to push the project to TestFlight this week. I have a couple of usability features I’d like to polish up/add before releasing. To name a few:

  • Improve Markdown editor for comments and posts (currently writing this from Arctic, and the editor is lacking polish)
  • Improve performance around media playback for video types (mov, mp4, hsl, etc)
  • Implement better error handling to notify the user if something does not succeed
  • Add support for spoilers

As of right now Arctic has a a fairly full feature set for the initial release. To name a few off the top of my head:

  • Subscription Feed
  • Post Feed
  • Post View
  • Inbox (Comments, Replies, Mentions, Messages)
  • Search (Posts, Comments, Communities, Users)
  • Submitting/Editing Comments
  • Submitting/Editing Posts
  • View Community Sidebars
  • (Un)Subscribe, (Un)Block, (Un)Hide Communities and Users
  • Options for making posts as read
  • Supports dynamic type for respecting system font size settings NSFW blurring/filtering
  • Basic support for handling lemmy URLs in app (WIP)

There is quite a bit more to mention, and I will try and compile a complete feature/issue list before releasing.

In the interest of submitting this post before my going back to work (I’m currently on my lunch break) I will wrap this up here. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions/suggestions. I will also try and upload more screenshots of Arctic before releasing.

Also, Arctic is still in need of a proper icon. I whipped one up in Sketch, and it’s rather pitiful.