The Betas of Elytra

May 10, 2018

Elytra's new App icon

Something is off? Something doesn’t sound right? Something doesn’t look right!

That’s it, it’s the new name and App icon. Yes, Yeti still remains our internal codename however, since this is the first Beta build, I couldn’t think of a better time to finally reveal the actual product name we’re going with: Elytra.

There’s also a new domain name. An .app domain. I’ve been waiting to acquire this domain so I can finally release the Beta.

Well, here’s what’s new in the first Beta;

What’s new

  • Dark Theme for iPhones & iPads
  • Black Theme for iPhone X.
  • Serif type (Using Georgia at the moment, please email me your font suggestions).
  • Improved Memory management.
  • Lowered disk usage (and therefore lower power consumption) when a post has lots and lots of images.
  • Image galleries are now accessible including controls.
  • Improved Quotes design.
  • Improved code blocks rendering.
  • Improved text rendering performance.
  • Improved “Add To Elytra” (previously, “Add to Yeti”) share extension.
  • Moved the Article Helper interface to the right edge on iPads. It moves to the left for RTL idioms.

What’s fixed

  • Galleries with images with no height information are now rendered correctly.
  • Galleries with more images than what can be fit horizontally (page control) are now rendered as groups of 5 photos per control.
  • Fixes unread pull-to-refresh crash.
  • The Title & author text is now aligned correctly with the rest of the text in the article interface.
  • Fixed the “Add to Elytra” (previously, “Add to Yeti”) share sheet extension crashes.

Known issues

When working on some features and fixing some bugs, I ended up running into a lot of UIKit bugs. Following are some of the known issues Elytra will present which we have to depend on Apple to fix:

  • When using a dark theme, the navigation bars will misbehave and present a lot of unexpected states and behaviours.
  • When searching inside an article, the highlighted area is often mis-positioned to the left or right (this depends if you’re using a LTR or RTL idiom) however, scrolling up or down a little positions this highlight correctly.
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