I’m about to start another round of Gluon coding. Probably work on the “Following” screen or start work with adding replies. There are a few plans for Favourites and Discover, but they need to sit in my head a little longer.
Vincent Ritter
Gluon for Micro.blog
A beautiful, nimble and customisable app purposely built for Micro.blog. Now archived. Thank you to all through the years ✌️❤️
Gluon is a highly opinionated, but customisable, cross platform app for Android and iOS for Micro.blog.
If you’d like to find out more, please visit the Gluon website. Or keep scrolling to read the development blog.
With Gluon, you can do the following:
- View your timeline, mentions and favourites.
- Reply or post to Micro.blog and also set favourites.
- Discover the discovery feed including all the “emoji” tagged discover sections.
- Search users or posts on Micro.blog.
- View user profiles and follow, or, unfollow.
- Add multiple accounts to the app, if you have more.
- Customise the app from theme, font, accent colours and more.
- And much more.
Project posts JSON/RSS Feed...
Fixed a few minor Android issues for Gluon. I’ll have it ready by the weekend and will write a post about a new beta invite 😊
Gluon was approved for public TestFlight a few hours ago 😃 There are many things on my plate and I'll do my best to ship regular updates. Whilst it doesn't look like much changed... everything has!
There are a few things still missing and I'm hoping to be in a good spot in a week or so. I'll also need to check the Android build and get that ready.
Gluon TestFlight build is "in review" 🙃
I solved most of the Gluon HTML issues now, unfortunately now I have to fight with WP Smiley emojis again. One step at a time.
Initial Gluon 2.0 alpha release
I’m feeling a bit under pressure to release Gluon as the older TestFlight version has run out. So in an abnormal move, I’m just going to release what I have to my lovely TestFlight testers. Rather have that away from my mind so I can concentrate on other things too.
It’s far from complete and it has more features missing and many bugs compared to my last public build. However, it now has incredibly strong foundations for a great future (so I hope).
The coming weeks and days will be busy getting it ready with feature parity with the old build… so give me a bit of time to work on those.
Biggest things missing from this new build:
- Replying (end of next week)
- Account/Profile screen (end of week)
- HTML feed (the posts, they still need tweaking and sometimes miss a few things - this week for trying to sort that)
- Gallery view (maybe this weekend)
- Post actions eg: reporting user, favour post etc (no timescale)
- Discover categories (no timescale as I’m implementing a custom JSON feed for the categories, so I don’t have to push updates out when there are new things)
There’s probably more…
Android version will also be released in the coming weeks.
The last app build was between 22Mb and 26MB. This one is going to be ~5MB 🤩
It will hopefully hit your devices as soon as Apple review it:
Feedback is always welcome ([email protected]).
Added the conversation view to Gluon. Just uploading that to TestFlight. I'm thinking of releasing what I have (just for laughs). Unsure if I have to get Apple to approve the 2.0.0 increase first though. If it goes straight through... oh well, then everyone has an updated app 😋
I always try and push many internal TestFlight builds. That way I always test on my test device and also on my main phone. Happy I do that because I actually find stuff that's not in "dev".
Out of interest, if you use Micro.blog, how do you generally prefer to use Favourites on the platform or in an app? For example, I use them to refer back to someone later on or if I really really like something that I want to refer back to later. Please send me use cases 🥺
Which one do you prefer? Ignore the "following" text for now - that's a WiP.
Left image:
Or right image:
Here is a more refined version of the profile view. I'm thinking of adding the image to the right section and flowing the bio full width below the initial data. Will report back with a different version.
What would a great way to write this line shorter?
"Following 486 users you aren't following" - I know it's pretty much on point, just trying to think if that can be made shorter. "Following 486 unique users", "Following 486 other users". They all seem to miss the mark though.
I'm about to start another round of Gluon coding, so feel free to ignore my rapid fire posts. I'll be working on the conversation view and some other tweaks. Maybe I'll even do something totally different. I won't have too much time today as I also need to work on some actual client work 😋
Today’s plan is to add the Conversation view into Gluon. As a stretch goal I’ll also add the currently logged in User Profile view.
I fixed the profile view bug very early AM and added the “Follow/Unfollow” button on a profile. Pretty happy with that.
That would leave the reply functionality and image viewer. I’m hoping I get to that tomorrow.
There is also some work required on my HTML parser... as it’s not working as I want it to - it sometimes just misses part sentences and images.
This means that the next TestFlight should be ready for end of this week.
Fixed a crashing bug when not logged in, kept going with loading data for the profile screen. I do need to make a few changes here, with the way I navigate to another profile (as I load a new Author Profile model, which overrides the last profile I was on - oops).
