Elytra Blog

Elytra v2.4 is now available

Elytra’s 2021 third quarter release is here and is ready for iOS and iPadOS 15.

This is the first release with a modern and cutting-edge foundation which focuses on reliability, stability and ease of adding new features in future releases.

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

New

Quick Notes

Quick notes has been one of my favourite additions to iPadOS 15. You can quickly reference articles using it in your notes with a simple drag and drop.

Prominent Scene

The inclusion of prominent scene is a great addition to the multitasking arsenal on iPadOS. Simply pinch out from an article to open it inside its own prominent scene.

Extra Large Widgets

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Extra large widgets on the iPadOS 15 makes getting a quick overview of recently fetched articles even easier. All widgets have been updated to support this new size.

Other New Additions

• Added a new sync method to also sync added and deleted feeds on sync.
• Added a new Portrait Lock preference under miscellaneous settings.
• Added support for tables in articles.
• New and improved article list view. It renders twice as fast now and uses less power overall.
• Added a “Enable Push Notifications” toggle under Settings > Notifications. You will only see it if Push Notifications are not already enabled on that device. For cross-device sync, it is recommended you turn this on.
• Added the old v1 app icon to the list of customisable icons.
• New options for Feed Settings:
  • Open Articles in the Browser. This is useful for feeds where full-text extraction fails.
  • You can now toggle full-text fetching for feeds. When you open an article from that feed, the full-text content will be automatically loaded.

Improvements

• Categorised keyboard shortcuts on iPadOS.
• Added a small bar underneath the status bar when you have the hides bars preference enabled. This prevents underflow of the content and helps prevent the distracting “text over text” situation.
• New Photos Browser
• Improved external display/Airplay handling
• If you add multiple folder widgets, you can configure each one with a unique folder. The previous limitation of a single folder has been fixed. (back-ported to iOS 14).
• Improved error messages across the app. The app will now display error messages directly from the API’s error.
• Added delete and info swipe actions to the search results for Feeds.
• Notifications under the app settings will now also show Local Notifications if any are enabled.
• Improved scrolling performance on iOS 14 and 15 inside the article reader.
• New and improved settings UI.
• New Appearance customisation UI in the article reader (on iOS 15, it’ll appear as a bottom sheet).
• Improved visuals for the folder row if a feed is being dropped onto it.
• Improved dragging states for feeds and articles.
• The sidebar now maintains the folders expansion state across app launches.
• Added the cmd + G (cmd + shift + G for backwards) shortcut for navigating to the next article search result.
• Added Keyboard shortcuts to dismiss interfaces like New Feed, Feed Info and other modals.
• Improved sync and timeline loading performance for users with several filters.
• Added the ability to reuse your existing account ID for signing in to the app. Please contact support on details on how to use this.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where marking some articles as read failed if they were recently synced on to the device.
• Fixed an issue across all platforms that could sometimes cause a crash on launch when available system memory is low.
• Fixed an issue with the title view in the articles list being hidden after scrolling.
• Fixed an issue when swiping back from the article reader when the bars are hidden to cause the layout to get janked.
• Fixed an issue with the new sync not updating the feed’s folder structure if one already exists.
• Fixed a crash that was caused when changing from light to dark mode and the article reader was open.
• Fixed an issue with the Article Reader’s bottom helper view used a black background and black shadow causing it to appear blurry for some users.
• Potentially fixed a crash for some users when using the toolbar preference.
• Fixed a crash that would sometimes occur when opening an article with Lists containing multiple line-breaks at the beginning of the paragraph.
• Fixed a long standing issue on iPadOS where the currently selected article or sidebar item would get deselected when the app was backgrounded and then foregrounded again.
• Fixed a bug with importing OPML Files with invalid/incorrect format.
• Fixed an issue where the feed settings would not be loaded correctly on app launch.
• Fixes an issue which caused Feeds only re-sync to fail which also caused background sync to fail sometimes. This could potentially cause feeds metadata to get wiped.

Elytra - 2021 Q3 Schedule

Elytra v2.4 is on track for its release later this year in Q3 along side iOS & iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey. Apart from the various goodies that’ll be introduced in these versions, Elytra will additionally gain support for:

• Tables in articles
• Improved external display support (via Airplay or connected through a cable)
• Inline support for Vimeo videos (similar to Youtube videos)
• Instagram Feeds support
• Additional per feed settings

Elytra will also include options to reset various data points of your account directly from the app without having to contact support. This will ensure that should the data on any of your devices get corrupted, you’ll be able to start fresh immediately.

iOS

iOS and iPadOS 15 include some interesting improvements especially around sharing your onscreen content via SharePlay, new multi-tasking views and wider widgets on iPadOS.

I’m also working on improving the overall reliability of the app by digging through older known bugs and patching them as I go. Some of the bugs have been fixed by Apple directly and Elytra gets that added stability for free.

Back in February, I started the process of migrating a lot of code from Objective-C to Swift, but I left out the Article Reader view since its code was thousands of lines spanning across several files. As of last week, I’ve completed the migration for the Article reader as well and found several bugs thanks to Swift’s strongly-typed nature.

The Article Reader is now more resistant to crashing, locking up and sometimes straight-up bad rendering. I’ve even managed to log improved performance under certain cases, but the average performance is roughly the same (differences in 1/1000th of a second) so you won’t notice any difference.

macOS

Apple has thankfully introduced some new APIs in macOS Monterey for Mac Catalyst apps which enables me to reduce some workarounds in code. I’ll be fully supporting Big Sur until a later point in time, so I’ll have to maintain some of them, but I’m glad we have direct access to some of macOS' existing features now.

I’m also investing some time in writing new interfaces for existing ones which look and feel at home on macOS and work with the various experiences we’re used to on non-touch input based devices. The filters preference tab was the first view to get such a treatment and others like: New Feed, New Folder, Import and Export OPML, etc. will also be getting the same treatment.

Shortcuts

Apple is also bringing the Shortcuts app to macOS Monterey. Now that shortcuts is available across iOS and macOS, I’d love to hear from you about automations that Elytra can enable for you. As an RSS Feed Reader app, there isn’t much Elytra can do for you, but whatever little it can, it should. So please reach out to me at support@elytra.app with your ideas.

If you have any other ideas, feel free to get in touch with me on the above email.

Timelines

Beta builds on TestFlight are now processing once again as of iOS & iPadOS 15 Beta 2. The public beta program for these operating systems has also commenced. If you’re going to be living on the bleeding-edge of things, I’d really appreciate your help in testing Elytra on these versions. These are beta software (both from Apple and I) so proceed with caution as you could end up losing a lot or all of your data.

But if you’re throwing caution to the wind, head over to this TestFlight link and get signed up. I’ll start sending out new builds for iOS 15 starting 5th of July, 2021.

For macOS, head over to the Elytra Releases page, download the app and set it up. Then, open preferences and under Misc > Updates, select the Test builds line. The macOS update will also be available on the same day as the iOS build goes up.

I look forward to your feedback, until then: Happy Reading!

Bug Fixes available for the Summer 2021 Release

Since the release of the Summer 2021 builds last week, I have released two additional patch versions for Elytra.

The builds are available on the App Store and on the dedicated Releases page.

Combined Release Notes:

• Fixed an issue where the app would crash when creating a new folder.

• Fixed some minor visual bugs with the Subscriptions Interface.

• Fixed a bug causing the app to always index feeds on launch for Spotlight.

• Fixed a bug where the article reader preferences would not apply in real time.

• Drag & Drop for feeds across folders is now enabled.

• Drop & Drop for articles into Unread or Bookmarks is now enabled.

• Fixed an issue with articles rendering empty audio players in the article reader.

• Fixed an issue with the articles next / previous commands being mapped to cmd + up and down arrow. They are now correctly marked to J and K including the app menu.

• Fixed an issue where no activity indicator would be shown on macOS when adding a new feed.

• Fixed some minor bugs with adding new feeds.

• Fixed loading Youtube videos.

• Fixed an issue where audio from videos wouldn’t play if the mute switch on your iPhone is on.

Elytra - Notarized Builds Now Available

Elytra v2.3 has just been released, you can read all about here.

I’m also excited to announce that Elytra is now also available on macOS as a Notarized app. You can head over here to download the latest release.

It’s same as the Mac App Store release with two distinct differences:

1. The app can auto-update itself (or you can manually check for updates) between the two Release and Test Build pipelines. The release line is recommended for most users, the test line is for those who like living on the edge.
2. The app will use an external Payment Processor which enables me to offer discounts, especially for students, you can read more about it here.

Going forward, I’ll be able to release more frequent fixes directly to the Notarized builds. These builds currently do not have any kind of crash reporter built-in. So if you encounter any crashing bugs, please do take a moment to send me the crash report.

I look forward to hearing from you about this, you can always reach out to me on twitter or email me at support@elytra.app. Happy Reading.

Elytra Summer 2021 Update

Elytra’s 2021 Summer Release is here, just in time for WWDC 2021. It’s been extra challenging to work on v2.3 as this is the first release of Elytra that introduced Swift into various core systems of the app. 

If you have read my earlier post about the public beta, you'd know this has been in the works for a while, but the work on the new version started all the way back in February of 2020. 

This is slightly bigger release (even I am not used to this) so this is going to need a TLDR.

TLDR;

• New system for adding feeds: You can explore topics by prefixing your keyword with the # symbol. Or directly search for a website with its base URL.
• Sync is now faster: more reliable and uses a delta updates approach to conserve power and network bandwidth.
• Two new Widgets: Folders (configurable) and Bloccs.
• Improved App Performance: Thanks to a new core, the app’s performance has seen a big boost and crashes less.
• Filters on macOS: You can now add and remove filters directly from the macOS App.
• Mini Audio player: Elytra now ships with a mini-audio player to quickly browse through audio-clips and podcast episodes.
• Media Playback: Elytra now comes with improved support for Youtube and Apple Trailers feeds.
• Search: Searching for feeds and articles is now simpler than ever and on macOS, it’s always available.
• Reader Bar: You can now customise the reader bar size and choose from three sizes: Small, Regular and Large.
• Finally: As always, an assortment of improvements and fixes.

New

Adding Feeds

Elytra v2.3 introduces a new system for finding and adding feeds to your lists. You can explore some pre-defined topics or search for topics of your interest by prefixing the keyword with a # key.

To directly explore feeds linked by a website, simply type in the website’s URL. If you have a feed URL, then you can directly use that.

Something that been asked for a long time is to directly add a feed to a folder when creating it. It’s now possible to do so and all your folders will be listed out. By default, None will be selected.

Core Sync

Syncing across all apps is now faster, more reliable and also automatically syncs in the background to keep all your devices in sync and ready to go. This lays a critical foundation for future releases.

The new sync system is written in Swift (version 5.4 for those who care) and is much more resilient, fault-tolerant and heavily tested compared to its previous iteration.

It also now uses a delta updates system so your devices only download the data they don’t already have. Multiple sync triggers can happen simultaneously on a single device of yours (say you added a feed, then marked all the items inside that feed as read which will trigger two events). This ensures your devices consume less power and consume less network bandwidth.

Two New Widget Types

v2.3 brings two new Widgets: Folders and Bloccs. The Bloccs widget brings up to 6 of the latest unread articles from your feeds to your device's homescreen, decorated by the articles' cover images. The Folders' widget enables to you select a folder of your choice and showcase up to 4 articles from that folder. I can't wait to see how you have these setup on your devices.

Performance

I’ve spent all of March working through various modules in the app to optimise the performance. The Article Reader was the only component in the app that was optimised down to the last bit (to my best knowledge and technical capabilities). Everything else was just mish-mash. You should now notice improved performance in the app for just about any activity you’d perform in it.

Filters on macOS

Filters have been available in Elytra since v1.0 so it was always weird that there was no UI for it on macOS. Now there is, it's mac-assed and works exactly as you'd expect it to.

### New Subscriptions UI

I also took this opportunity to redesign the subscriptions interface. The new design is an indicator towards the next iteration of the design system for Elytra, it better and more clearly explains the advantages of each subscription type and enables you to quickly switch between the two offerings.

Mini Audio Player

For a long time, I’ve used Elytra to notify me when new episodes are available for the podcasts I follow. In v2.3, I’ve built a mini-audio player into the app. It detects Podcast episodes and automatically updates its rendering state. This is in no way a replacement to a full-fledged Podcast app, but just a little something to get you a sneak-peak into that episode if you so desire.

Rich Media

I’ve made several improvements to the API and the apps to improve media playback. This fixes some Youtube videos not loading correctly. But most importantly, the apps now load, and enable playback of Movie trailers from the trailers.apple.com RSS Feeds.

Search

The apps now feature global search enabling you to search for Feeds and Articles. You can also match for author names. In a future release, tokens will also be introduced to tokenise your search for a more precise hunt.

If you’re looking up an article and there are no feed suggestions for the app to provide, the app will suggest feeds from the articles it has found. So you can jump to the feed or the article.

Reader Bar Sizes

To ensure the app is accessible by everyone, Elytra has always supported Dynamic Type, Voice Over and the various navigation accessibility features that macOS and iOS provides. In March, a customer got in touch with a complaint about the reader bar and a potential solution. We worked on that solution and I am now happy to let you know that the reader bar now comes in three sizes: Small, Regular (default) and Large. You can toggle the size from Settings > Misc.

PS: This setting has no effect if you’re using the toolbar.

Improvements

• Drastically improved performance and accuracy of batch marking articles as read. (In my testing, marking a batch of 2000 articles as read previously took over 8s, and now only takes 2s).

• Counting unread articles is now literally 6 times faster. The app can now spend less time keeping these counters up to date and more time rendering articles.

• Improved handling and logic for rotation on iPadOS. This also fixes the blank slate launch state of the app on iPads in portrait mode.

• Sharing articles on macOS will now use the recommended approach instead of the workaround I was previously using. This will ensure a smoother experience across various macOS versions.

• The macOS app will now correctly sync after waking up your mac from sleep.

Fixes

• Fixed a critical and long standing issue where articles marked as read on one of your devices would not sync to your other devices.

• Fixed a critical bug where the “Start Trial” button would have no effect or start the process and keep the button disabled preventing retries.

• Fixed an issue where opening a Feed or a Folder and then opening the Unread list would reset the sorting preference to Unread - Latest First.

• Fixed an issue with sync not working correctly upon a fresh signup.

• Fixed an issue where the wrong state for the article reader would be setup: incorrectly showing next and previous articles to be available when only a single article was available in that list.

• Fixed an crashing bug on iPadOS where the app would crash after backgrounding the app.

• Fixed a bug in which HTML would show in the summary field.

• Fixed a bug with Substack newsletters where the images in the posts would be really small (Substack converts the original URLs into their image proxy URLs for the Feeds which caused this issue, Elytra strips out this information and then loads the images).

• Fixed a bug where custom feed names would not correctly sync across to your other devices.

• The macOS app will no longer open duplicate windows. If it finds an existing window for the same activity, it’ll bring that window to the foreground.

• Externally connected displays on iPads will now mirror the the iPad screen. This would previously display the app’s UI at native resolution with no scaling. A future release will correctly address this issue.

Elytra Summer 2021 Public Beta

You’ve been waiting for this, haven’t you?

The Summer 2021 update isn’t quite ready yet, but I’m happy to announce the Public Beta details.

You can join the TestFlight Public Beta list here.

You should also consider joining the Slack Group for sharing feedback, screenshots, videos and the list. Head over the #iOS channel there.

If you don’t prefer Slack, the support email is always open.

I won’t be sharing the change log here. It’s available on the TestFlight log for now. You should go through it carefully before installing the new beta.

This brings the app back up to parity with v2.2.3 albeit with two features currently disabled. I will commence work on the new features and widgets later this week. 

I look forward to your feedback. Cheers.

Elytra Winter 2020 Update

The Winter 2020 update is finally ready in 2021! This is the first release of Elytra which brings local sync, local notifications and a lot of performance and stability improvements to the apps.

Similar to Elytra v2 and v2.1, this is an iOS 14 only release. The latest supported version for iOS 13 is v1.8 and will be deprecated soon.

You can download the update from the App Store. 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.

Local Sync

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This release brings Local Sync to the apps. Local Sync caches all articles across all your feeds (just like other RSS Feed Reader Apps). This is not a “new” technique. Feed Reader apps have been doing this for as long as I can remember. Elytra now uses the same technique by leveraging its APIs to make the entire process a lot faster!</p>

Elytra does not have to check every single feed if it has new updates. It uses a single API to check if updates are present, and if they are, sync them to your devices.

Full Change Log

New

• Local Sync. All feeds are now synced to your device locally, so you can continue reading even when your device is offline.
• Added a new “Title View” to individual feeds. Open a feed and tap on its title. This shows the Feed Info and two preferences at the moment: Push/Local Notifications & Safari Reader Mode. These are per feed settings. This is very similar to the design and functionality from NetNewsWire, is directly inspired by it, but with a minor difference: the layout and copy denotes which feeds support Push Notifications, while the others supporting Local Notifications.
• Push Notifications Request Form. If you already have push notifications enabled, you won’t see this. This is per device.
• Added support for background push notifications to keep all your devices in sync without needing manual refreshing.
• Push Notifications for new articles now download and cache the article for immediate use.

Improvements

• Tapping on a folder now opens the folder’s feed.
• Tapping on the disclosure icon on a folder now toggles its expanded state.
• Filtering is now stricter. It’ll match “sponsor” but will not match “sponsored”.
• Added Feeds to the iOS Search Index. You can now directly open feeds by their names (or custom names if you have one set).

Fixes

• Fixed the tint colour for the blog name when opening a micro-blog article.
• Fixed adding feed by URL where the feed presents multiple options.
• Fixed an issue when searching by title for 3-letter sites like CNN or BBC.
• Fixed articles not loading for certain feeds.
• Fixed Today View not updating when opened after an app launch.
• Fixed an issue with the iPadOS app showing different widths for the columns in different orientations or environments (split view).
• Fixed an issue with the apps not correctly download bookmarks from the API.
• Fixed an issue where toggling folders in the sidebar interface would show empty folders.
• Fixed an issue with certain CJK paragraph blocks rendering incorrectly when certain linebreak characters are used in the paragraph text.
• Fixed an issue with filters incorrectly hiding articles when matching against CJK based filters.
• Fixed an issue with line-heights in the articles list for multi-lined article titles with favicons.
• Fixed an issue where the “no articles” label would appear over the articles.
• Fixed an issue for adding Streaming Video Channel feeds. They recently changed their format which was causing issues.
• Fixed a crash when writing the widgets data to disk when the app has just been sent to the background.
• Fixed Navigation Bar buttons not appearing in some contexts.

Thank you for reading.

2021 Pricing Calibration

In late 2020, Apple adjusted pricing for the Indian AppStore which raised the pricing for Monthly and Yearly subscriptions.

Starting tomorrow: 5th Jan, 2021 I’ve calibrated the amounts back to the original pricing. This resets the monthly pricing back to INR 79/month. Most other regions will remain unaffected. The yearly pricing has been reduced for most regions though.

Apple has recently accepted me in their Small Business Program, which makes this recalibration possible for me, so I can forward these savings to you, my customers.

Thank you for your continued support, happy reading!

Designing Elytra for macOS Big Sur - Part 1

Big Sur has been the biggest change to macOS since I started using it back during the OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) days. We’ve gone from the “hyper aqua” to the subdued and flatter aqua look and finally into the iOS-esque Big Sur design language.

In part 1, we’ll go through the app’s interface from top to bottom, left to right. So as is the case, let’s begin with the toolbar.

Toolbars

In Big Sur, Apple has completely changed the toolbar, not only in terms of its visual design, but also how it behaves, its sizing, allowing content to flow under it (just like iOS' Navigation Bars), monochrome icons and sticky sections.

The new toolbars in some contexts are even invisible. They are part of the content as seen in Photos.app.

Here’s a quick comparison between Elytra for macOS Catalina and macOS Big Sur.

I’ve included fullscreen screenshots on purpose, because Big Sur really enables deferring all UI real-estate to the content if you so desire. In Elytra’s case, an app for reading written content, this was a default choice.

Big Sur also enables pinned or sticky sections for the toolbar, so each vertical column of the app has its own set of actions. While v2.1.3 (first version, odd, I know!) shipped with the toolbar items as you can see, they are definitely set to change in an upcoming release to bring more powerful features to the app.

With macOS taking care of so many things for me, Mac Catalyst became the obvious choice for Elytra right from the get go.

The Sidebar

Full height column, translucent materials, collapsible sections,searchbars, automatic light and dark states; I could keep going on. The new frameworks supplied by Apple to compose such sidebars have been the best thing since their Compositional Layouts framework. And the new sidebars rely on this Compositional Layouts framework to enable a lot of these things automatically.

They are however not without their faults. They do lack some features which native AppKit apps have but I’m sure they’ll all arrive in due time as Apple Engineers continue to reduce the gap between macOS and iOS, or I switch to using SwiftUI and everything renders natively per host OS.

Articles List

This was a tricky one to get right. Up until late October, this is how the Articles List looked

There are a few reasons why this is completely wrong on macOS.

1. The list item completely ignores the new insets which native apps on Big Sur use.
2. The list ignores the additional padding required by such lists.
3. The list also ignores the inter-cell padding.

All of this is noted by Apple in the “What’s new in macOS” HIG document.

By using Apple’s supplied values, we get a list which is much more comfortable to read and glance at.

So even if you're using Mac Catalyst to bring your iPadOS App to macOS, I urge you spend some time studying the HIG (and not just read it) so you're familiar with what your users are going to expect from your app.

The Article Reader

This is what you’re here for. This is why I built Elytra. The article reader in Elytra renders all text using Apple’s TextKit framework, all images directly supplied to UIImageView subclasses, most videos directly supplied to the AVPlayerView, and all code rendered just like text.

Groups of consecutively appearing images are converted into horizontally scrolling galleries with page counters.

Customisation of the reader view by setting up your preferences for font-size, line-spacing, separate header and paragraph fonts.

It’s all there, it all works just as you have come to expect coming from the iOS and iPadOS apps. But it wasn’t as simple as enabling the magical “Optimise for Mac” option in Xcode.

To make sure things work correctly on both iOS and macOS, I had to redo a few bits of the rendering engine to make sure text renders sharp on modern Macs and renders exactly as one would expect it to.

Here’s how the Scale Interface to match iPad variant looked:

Everything was tiny. Everything looked off. Nothing looked like it it deserved to be on macOS. When working on the macOS Catalina build, I used a small hack to scale all type by 1.3x and even that didn’t look all that great.

So to make sure everything is up to the mark and deserving of the Mac-assed Mac App title, I reworked a good chunk of the rendering engine which also ended up benefiting the iOS and iPadOS apps by improving the rendering performance.

I also took the opportunity to enable better rendering for CJK and Indic languages.

In part 1, we looked at the app from a distance, assessed it from left-to-right, went over each column and briefly discussed each section. In part 2, I hope to dig into some technical details of bringing an iPadOS App to macOS via Catalyst.

Elytra is now available for macOS Big Sur

Elytra is now available on the Mac App Store.

It’s finally happened. It took 3 years and I hope it was worth the wait.

Elytra for macOS brings the same native rendering performance you have come to know and love on iOS and iPad OS.

All of this has been possible because of Apple’s Mac Catalyst system which has been significantly improved on Big Sur, since its debut on macOS Catalina.

Your subscription will carry forward to the macOS App as well, no separate purchase or subscription will be necessary. (You can also take this opportunity to take advantage of the special pricing I have going on for Diwali)

I’ll be sharing a deep-dive into the design decisions for Elytra, but for now, I hope you enjoy the release.

As always, Happy Reading!

PS: A small update for iOS and iPadOS has also been released, so be sure to grab that from the App Store as well.