Connect for Lemmy App

I was just making a post on another community, and after writing it out, I went to revise the title, and subsequently the post body disappeared. Might be related to including an image upload. Had to rewrite the post body and ended up shortening it quite a bit.

When I started using Connect, all the other apps I'd tried for Lemmy were so janky that I considered this too small an issue to ask about but after many versions I'd like to get to the bottom of it and see if it's just my phone.

In landscape mode, images will frequently not scale to fit the screen so you're essentially looking at a small section of the image greatly zoomed in. This would be frustrating at the best of times but it couples with another oddity of Connect, which is how it handles standard touchscreen ways of interacting with images. When the image is incorrectly scaled as I described you can't zoom out so you have to have this zoomed in view and try to pan around to view the image in sections but that can't really be done either because there's flow on effects to this glitch making that impossible. You simply can't move the image around enough to be able view the whole image when no matter how careful you are because there's some kind of imposed limit on the movement which is very small and if you exceed it, the image closes back to the comments again. Often though no always, if you zoom in by double tapping, you can't then zoom out again to where you were before and sometimes this also goes for pinch to zoom, if you try to move the image around to see at least a bit more of it, you have to do so very carefully because if you move by too much, or too quickly it closes the image and returns to the comments or posts view. Also if you single tap an image, it closes the image as well. It will also frequently kind of rubber band the image back to where you started if you didn't move it in just the right way.

If you view in portrait mode, things are a lot better, but still odd. You still have all the weird image navigation issues described above, but they are made worse because to adequately view most landscape images in portrait you're really going to have to zoom significantly but that means lots of extreme movement and if you're not very careful with this, you end up closing the image and also sometimes you'll zoom in on a feature and now it won't zoom out again and you need to reload the image. Also in portrait mode, the image loads at the very top of the screen under the UI 'x' in the corner for quitting the image which means to actually see that part of the image unobscured you have to move the image by a large amount which puts you at great risk of accidentally closing it. On phones with notches this is especially annoying because loading the image at the very top puts it below the notch as well.

Long pressing on a comment has always collapsed it unless you were replying to the comment, then you could long press to highlight a string of text to quote for a reply.
Now, long pressing closes the parent in reply mode and there is no way to highlight text to copy for quoting purposes.

Same problem as the original post linked. In the comments someone gave the solution but deleted the comment. I've tried to copy-paste to see what it was, but it says Permanently Deleted. Any help is greatly appreciated.

I've enjoyed using Connect but I've got no clue how it got this big.

Would be nice to have a user's instance displayed in the results on the user search page. I was glad to see the change for the feed and post page and it would be helpful to be able to distinguish who's who at a glance. Particularly when you're trying to find a specific user and there's multiple accounts across instances with the same nickname.

Is this a Connect issue or a Catbox issue?

When an inline video is present, Lemmy Connect doesn't display it - just a blank space.

Eg. This post, number 10: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28135123

On the web interface it works, so it ought to work in Connect too.

Lemmy Connect attempts to add ?format=webp to the image URL when loading .gif image, this makes many Lemmy servers return an error. When opening the post in the web browser, without the extra addition to the image URL, the image loads correctly.

Post where the bug is present: https://lemmy.world/post/19556846

I'm upset that a meme I tried to remake with Unicode box drawing characters lines up terribly in apps: https://lemmy.ca/post/28490027 Shouldn't code blocks render in monospace?

On Lemmy's web frontend it's perfect:

On Connect it looks like this:

On Jerboa it's basically the same:

Eternity does use monospace but the box drawing characters seem to be too wide.

All I can find about it here is one post from a year ago: https://lemmy.ca/post/1492857

Hey, I saw the link to this community in my settings today and just wanted to say thanks for the app. I use it every day.

Like "don't preload images on cell network"

Hi there, I've got this issue that when I try to upload an image it just doesn't work. It doesn't give me any error messages, the image is simply not uploaded. I click upload and nothing happens. If it's a screenshot, sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't. Connect doesn't give me any feedback if the image is uploading at all, or if the request was denied or ignored or whatever.

The issue seems to be worse when trying to upload an image in a comment. Has anybody else encountered this problem?

This seems to have surfaced when trying to open an Mbin magazine from Connect (via Lemmy of course), by tapping on them in the subs list (or searching/tapping).

If I search for [email protected] or [email protected] they both give this error, so I think it's something to do with Mbin magazines. I haven't seen it happen on Lemmy communities.

Hopefully tapping those links will show the error - they do here.

Right now, youtube has its own preference option, for method of opening. Could we expand this to allow users to input domains and select an opening method for them?

Generally, I want to open videos in app and articles in browser. I don't know if there's a better way to achieve this than giving users an option per domain, with custom domain input, but I'm open to other methods.

I often want to copy some phrase from a post to search it on the web. Long-pressing post text minimizes this post into a single line, which is not very useful IMO, I would rather have text selection cursor like in a web browser.

Say I start typing a comment, then decide to not bother. Instinctively I delete what I had typed, then press back. The UI asks me for confirmation to leave even though the field is blank. It should just go without confirmation if the field is blank.

I suspect it does this because it has a draft saved, but the current contents of the text box should take priority over a draft.

EDIT: Can confirm the update just fixed this, thanks for the quick fix!

Since the last update, I can't back out of the Post screen using hardware or in-app back buttons. The only way to back out is to first type something then hit back, which triggers the Stay/Leave popup. Before picking either option it already backs out of and discards the post, then choosing Leave backs out one more screen. Picking Stay does nothing.

Starting yesterday, Connect hard crashes when you attempt to click on the Inbox and the same happens if you click on the notification bell showing that there are messages.

As of this morning, the Inbox sidebar label is coloured Red instead of Blue.

Connect Version 1.0.190 Android v13 with latest security patches

Just started today. Possibly related to the recent updates.

Swiping to back out still works, at least for images

v1.0.190

This morning, connect is empty. All view modes are blank like the screenshot. Randomly ONE post shows up if I refresh a LOT, but immediately disappears. I can read and view my profile, but any posts I try and load from there are empty too.

Edit: I appear to be able to scroll the blank space for quite some time.

Editedit: other clients do not appear to be affected.

I just recently got the 190 update pushed. It mentioned lots of fixes. One was image handling.

I have found that now exiting an image is a bit slow or glitchy. A single gesture to go back does not exit and instead it needs two. Tapping an image instead still closes it but there is a delay that wasnt there before.

I'm on a pixel 7pro with gesture navigation.

After editing a comment, UI fails to load the next page. Haven't tested if it's only in non-native instances.

Anyway, if I want to review an edit, I have to hit back twice, refresh, then scroll to find my comment again.

Most don't load for me. Just get a black screen. The ones I've checked were mp4s from imgur. Not sure if that accounts for all of them though.

Edit: I think it started after the most recent update. Edit 2: mp4s from catbox.moe also doesn't work. It shows a spinner at the bottom but never loads.

Looking at the blown-up thumbnails while waiting for the full-size images to load is pretty uncomfortable for my eyes... they search for detail that isn't there yet, and get strained. If there was an option to just see a spinning wheel or similar, I'd choose it in a heartbeat. Alternatively, displaying the image line by line as it loads (slow scan from top to bottom) would be even better, as it would allow me back out before loading the whole thing.