We are closer to shipping Ivory v1.9! The big feature for this release is the ability to quote posts. If you'd like to test it out, jump back on the TestFlight version of Ivory. We've opened up some more TestFlight beta slots here as well:
Important Note!
The TestFlight version of Ivory doesn't use your active App Store subscription. You have to subscribe again in TestFlight. You do not get charged real money in TestFlight. It's for testing purposes only.
Seems like many are already asking, but this feature isn't anything special where you need to use Ivory. All we are doing is showing the post you are linking to visually vs just having a link to a Mastodon post which anyone has been able to do since the beginning of the service.
That and making the process of copying a link to a post and pasting it in the compose view more automated.
@ivory Hmmm, doesn‘t seem to work immediately, is there a delay of sorts? It was an embed in the compose flow, but after posting it‘s just a link again… :neocat_think:
Something else: Would it be possible to include a setting to make custom emotes bigger? Just a client side setting, not all text, just the emotes. I am used to having much larger emotes when using Misskey or other fedi software, the Mastodon ones are always so small and in Ivory they're even smaller, makes the emotes just very hard to look at. :blobcatcomfeyes:
And related to that: Can we expect Ivory support for animated emotes? :ablobcatbongo:
@Bendodroid No, larger emoji's would break text line heights and cause all sorts of issues. They have to be the same size as the text. Solution is to make the font sizes larger.
Animated emoji's are on our list to look at. Some of us want to do them while others don't and we need to figure out some sort of compromise. 🙂
@ivory Will users be notified when a post of theirs is “quote posted”? Not specifically by Ivory, just similar to other Mastodon activity. I'm not 100% clear on how this all works under the hood, curious whether a link inside a post triggers any kind of pingback-sort-of-thing.
@samf Nope. It's just linking to another posts just as you've always been able to do on Mastodon. We are just rendering the post inline vs just being a link.
@ivory not sure if this is an intentional design decision or not, but I don't see Quote functionality for posts that I'm viewing in the Notifications tab
@cdevroe somewhat. But we are getting towards the end of our public roadmap and wanted to do something impactful and something we’ve been wanting to use ourselves.
@ivory it’s kid of silly that @Gargron hasn’t added this functionality to Mastodon natively at this point with the option for folks to opt out of quote posts if they so choose.
@Meat_Bucket@Gargron They are working on it. Mastodon is a non-profit and relies on donations (https://www.patreon.com/mastodon) to grow their staff and developers to contribute to their open source project. Getting things like this done right just takes a lot of time and energy. As a small team ourselves, we totally understand and feel for them.
@ivory It did. Right as I left Ivory to copy a link from another app as I was composing a reply! I came back and it was updated. I wasn’t gone very long (20 seconds?). Came back to the “what to test” screens. That was unsettling, but at least it saved the draft. And now I have quoteboost!
I’m glad you guys did this. Some time ago it seemed implementing this would be a good way to get most of the way there. Hopefully other clients follow suit!
@tmmahaff We have a few outstanding VoiceOver bugs to fix that were reported already. Plan to go through a bunch of bugs on our list for the next release after this one.
@ivory are there any voiceover accessibility fixes in this release? For example: the search bar being broken at the top of the screen, and the timeline not loading properly. About three post down it will give voiceover a loading dialogue and it will kick you to the status bar.
@Blindworrell Not yet. We have a huge list of bugs to fix and will most likely go through them right after this update. The items you mentioned are on that list waiting to get fixed. Sorry for the wait! We just have so many things on our plate.
🪲Voiceover bugs: “the search button is broken to Voiceover users. It auto expands and shows all menu items without interaction from the user. Also the label for the menu button seems to be missing.” https://mastodon.social/@Blindworrell/111845293221826584, “there is a loading icon about 2 post down, after refreshing the timeline. Voiceover gets stuck on this, and eventually will jump up to the status bar when trying to navigate past it.” https://mastodon.social/@Blindworrell/111845966322733011
@ivory I have one more thing for voiceover users. Is there any chance that you guys can clean up the notifications tab? It is really complicated for voiceover users to navigate. If if we could interact with it just like the main timeline, that would be a big improvement.
@Blindworrell Might have to ask you details about this when we start working on those bugs. The notifications tab works very differently than a timeline overall for all users. Not sure if we did something wrong specifically in VoiceOver support or if it's the same for everyone.
please put the small image thumbnails back on the right instead of below the post, this just takes up more vertical space and forces the thumbnails to ge even smaller and i see no benefit
i don't like the usernames on separate line for similar reasons, also i'm on ipad and the screen is wide enough that i don't remember truncatipn ever being a problem
@tbodt yes we moved small thumbnails below the post. We understand that it's not optimal on iPad right now, but our iPad app is in need of a refresh which will come at some point. We now show all 4 small thumbnails side by side and it doesn't work there on an iOS device.
@tbodt No that just makes for messier code that becomes a bigger issue to manage in the future. We will figure things out when we spend more time on iPad specific updates in the future.
@MrEPCOT Oh I see what you are saying. They break in the post. Will see if we can replicate the issue by posting a custom instance emoji next to a regular one.
@MrEPCOT can I see a screenshot of your display settings in Ivory that show your set font size too? There must be some specific display configuration that's causing this. Just have to figure it out. 🙂
@MrEPCOT Really strange. I can't replicate it over here at all. Do you have any special accessibility settings enabled for iOS? I'm assuming your device isn't jailbroken or anything (not even sure if people do that anymore 😅).
@ivory is the quote button only on mac? i dont see it on ios even though ive had the beta installed for a few days. i have the button on the mac version.
@MikeBeas The boost action button should now show boost and quote. If you have "single tap to boost" enabled, you'll have to hold down on the boost icon to see it.
@whatthecj@ivory The Mac version is also listed as 1.8.4 in Testflight. The Mac version has build number 18392 and the iOS version has build number 18322.
@ivory Not a fan of the username on the 2nd line taking up more real estate - prefer same line truncated as it was. If I need to see the full username I just tap their avatar and view the profile.
@ivory seen a couple of layout issues, so on my mentions tab I just favourite your reply to me and the star is truncated off the right edge of my screen.
Tap the home tab and return to the Mentions tab and it draws it okay again.
@ivory Any chance of changing/updating the Boost icon to show the new behaviour? I was looking everywhere for a Quote option and didn’t realise it was behind the boost icon!
@Jfrites Ah got it. Will have to think about that one. Might feel too intrusive in a lot of cases. Personally, I'd feel the need to remove those hashtags because it's just a reply and not an originating post. I'd hate for everyone's replies to show up if I'm following a hashtag.
@AndyGER Hopefully someday. But it will require a lot of work on our low level code as our app was originally designed for Twitter which relies on numeric post ID's. So any services that use alphanumeric post ID’s just crash in our app because they can't be read.
@preslavrachev@ivory If it’s a screenshot of the quoted post or something, that’s fine, but if it’s something like “This post has been quoted using Ivory, learn more at apps.apple.com/ivory” I’m just never ever going to use that feature lol
Edit: Confirmed by Tapbots that a non-Ivory user will just see a link to the post!
@re_chief Just a normal link to a post. We aren't doing anything that couldn't be done since the beginning of Mastodon's existence. It's just a quality of life improvement seeing the post inline vs just a link to it. 🙂
@ivory I’m not sure I wouldn’t make the same decision, but wasn’t “quality of life” a problem on Twitter? The UX for publicly shitting on random people for clout was hassle-free.
@pseudepigram Many things in life are quality of life improvements that can be used for evil. A hammer, knife, etc. Doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. Showing a post that a user has linked to is a huge improvement and not having it doesn't prevent the same problems from potentially happening. 🙂
@ivory@pseudepigram I agree, but if people stopped building things and 90% of hammer use was clubbing puppies, then I'd at least consider some hammer restrictions/discouragement.
@devolute@pseudepigram definitely but that’s mastodon’s job to solve. We are just building the tool. 🙂 when they have an official way to do this, we will adopt it.
@ivory Your judgment hasn’t let me down so far. I guess I was mostly surprised at the apparent shift in reception from the Mastodon announcement to now. Maybe the Ivory user base has a selection effect, since former Tweetbot users are more used to Twitter.
@pseudepigram Not to say the feature won't get abused negatively, but in general Mastodon users are here because they hated how things were on places like Twitter. I'd like to think the majority of users want this place to be a positive experience. 🙂
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