Elytra Blog

September 2024.9 Release

The September 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

April 2024.4.1 Release

The April 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

April 2024 Release

The April 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

February 2024 Release

The February 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

January 2024 Release

The January 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

November 2023 Release

The November release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

v2023.10 for iOS

v2023.10 brings major improvements to the app, multiple bug fixes, and more coming soon...

This build also lands full support for iOS & iPadOS 17.

Improvements & Fixes

• New fluid toolbar design enabling you to fully take advantage of the full screen displays on modern devices.
• Fixed multiple bugs with widgets, most importantly:
  • tapping on an article in the widget now opens the correct article instead of the first article
  • widgets now show the articles in correct order
• New & faster sync API
• Simpler UI for adding feeds and folders
• Recommendations have been removed from the app, when adding a new feed, Elytra will now always prefer the direct feed URL instead.

You can download the update from the App Store.

The macOS app is being re-written using AppKit, it previously used MacCatalyst which has become harder to support over the last two years.

The Mac app is in a much better state now, but lacks some critical functionality like OPML imports, text customisation and the like. Rest assured, it's on track to be released by December 2023, or latest by January 2024.

January 2023 Release

I wish you a healthy & safe 2023. Elytra’s Jan 2023 release is full of fixes and stability improvements.

You can download the latest Mac release from Github as well. 

If you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review on the App Store. It makes a huge difference for me. Thank you in advance.

Improved

• App now uses the article’s date for notification timestamps

• Improves app responsiveness and reduces disk I/O usage.

• Improved networking stack

• Changed Preferences menu title to Settings on macOS 13.x

• Marking articles read/unread is now a local operation, i.e. if the Cloud request fails for any reason, the information is persisted and will be synced with the Cloud API once your device or the service is reachable across the interwebs.

Fixes

• Assortment of fixes from various crash reports

• Fixed rendering and scrolling slowness on macOS 13.x

• Ongoing fixes for filtering articles

• Fixed feed title not being fully visible upon scrolling

• Fixed custom feed title not being used (macOS only)

• Fixed stuttering when image loads and scrolling in the article reader.

Scroll Performance & macOS Ventura

I recently switched to using macOS Ventura on my MacBook M1 Pro as the primary working device.

This required a change in my workflow and given how these machines work, Elytra would always be up to date and ready with new articles when I opened the lid the morning.

I quickly began noticing abysmal scorlling performance in the article view of the app. On a second passs, I noticed everything about the article view was slow: rendering, scrolling, and resizing.

I ran the AppStore build on my macOS 12 system and did not observe the same, but this Mac had 64GB of memory, a dedicated desktop-class GPU and a 14-core workstation chip, all liquid cooled. So I began to wonder if the M1 Pro chip was being “lazy”.

I still wondered if I am to blame for this, I turned to instruments to analyze the rendering performance and behold: TextKit2 bites me again.

Now that I know what’s causing the issue, I turned to the internet: Apple’s Dev Forums, StackOverflow, various macOS engineering blogs and even mailing lists (those are still very very cool).

It turns out, I’m not the only one to be bit by TextKit 2’s erractic behaviour, incomplete APIs and a lack sensible documentation apart from a few WWDC videos. To make matters worse, unlike TextKit 1, this was no “drop-in” replacement like Apple claimed it to be and is an automatic opt-in when compiling with the latest SDKs.

In a sample project, TextKit2 rendering was atleast 70% slower than TextKit1. Worse, when resizing a window.

Luckily for me, I found this post by Daniel Jalkut

The simple workaround, for the time being anyway, is to force your text view to use TextKit 1. As explained in the WWDC excerpt above, this is as simple as asking it once for its layout manager, which will cause it to rebuild its entire text architecture to suit the TextKit 1 way of functioning

and the oneliner: let _ = myTextView.layoutManager

Because of how Elytra is archictected, this patch totaled in as a +1 -0 commit. Sweet. All text-rendering is mostly handled by a single View: Paragraph which other views like Heading, List, Blockquote, etc. are subclasses of.

With that fix in place, the article view was back to rendering, scrolling, and resizing at full 120Hz (sweet sweet ProMotion goodness).

This will become available as a fix in the upcoming builds v2022.11.3 (485) which are currently waiting for review.

If you’re using the notarized releases, the latest build is immediately available for download:

• Check for Updates from the app menu
• Download it from Github

If you’re also building and shipping a Catalyst app, and wondering if you’re app also may be affected by this issue: unless you are intentionally poking at the layout managers, containers of the text views, you shouldn’t have to worry. But if you are and notice similar issues, try forcing the text view to use TextKit 1 instead and see how that works out.

November 2022 Supplementary Release

I’ve just released a supplementary update for the November 2022 release.

The iOS update has been approved, the Mac update is pending review and should become available shortly. It includes some critical fixes so updating is highly recommended. 

You can download the latest Mac release from Github as well. 

Release Notes

New

• Added support for following Mastodon accounts through their RSS feeds. Start by adding the user’s ID (eg. @nikhil@social.dezinezync.com) in the new feed web address field.

Fixes

• Fixed some issues when loading images using the image proxy

• Fixed a bug with Smart Folders auto-grouping

• Fixed exporting log archive

• Fixed articles list sometimes not loading immediately after sync

• Fixed crash when opening an article with an embedded audio file which had a negative start offset (basically a file with bad metadata)

• Fixed a bug where “Mark All Read” would still show some articles are unread in the list

• Fixed a critical bug where internal DB connection wiring was all messy. It’s a lot cleaner now and put inside a neat little white-box imported from a Scandinavian country