One of the challenging aspects of building a federated mobile app is parsing post captions and being able to render them properly
See, when you make a post with mentions or hashtags, mastodon converts it to HTML and mobile apps have to deconstruct that HTML to be able to render mentions, hashtags and links properly
We could just render the HTML, but when you would tap on a hashtag or mention, it would open the browser instead of in-app
Mastodon and Pixelfed do provide mentions and hashtags as lists in the federated activity, you can't just trust the HTML itself because not every platform uses the same attributes
We can use the mention/hashtag lists to build the entitymap with indices we can provide to clients so they can properly implement deep linking
The new Pixelfed mobile app will preserve media aspect ratios, no need to tap to view the full image as photos will be rendered to preserve native aspect ratios😎
@brunomiguel@pixelfed Yes, we will default to system color mode (either light or dark) but you will have the option to force a preference, and that color mode preference will be shared across devices and web/apps so you have a consistent experience no matter what option you choose!
We standardized an API for this so 3rd party apps can implement this too, that way you can use any (supported) app and it will remember your preference!
This goes beyond dark mode btw, there are other settings we remember across apps like the ability to disable CW and show all media, or force yourself to add alt text to media before you can post!
I have a ton of small things to finish before I can ship the new Pixelfed app, that being said I do want to get it in your hands ASAP
I’m planning to release an alpha build APK this weekend (some things may not fully work yet, but you will have a chance to see the huge improvements and help provide feedback)