Spring 2020 Update

The Spring 2020 update for Elytra is here. 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. Here’s the full change log:

New

• iPadOS users gain the ability of the three column collapsible layout in landscape mode. This has been a highly requested feature and I’m glad to finally include it in Elytra.
• iOS 12 support has been dropped. From this version on, only iOS 13 will be supported. v1.5.4 will continue to work for users still using iOS 12.
• Blog Names below the Article’s title are now tappable. They open the blog’s article’s list. When you open an article from the blog’s own article list, this behaviour is disabled to prevent a rabbit hole situation.

Improvements

• Re-add WebP Images support.
• Improved handling of opening articles from push notifications.
• Minor Quality of Life adjustments and rendering improvements.
• Improved loading Youtube Videos. The HLS Manifest of the video is now loaded when available. If this is absent, then the mp4 file is checked for and loaded if available. Using the HLS Manifest improves battery usage, performance and lowers data usage. The HLS Manifest is directly handled by the OS and hence also respects Low Data modes on your WiFi or Cellular connections.
• Keyboard commands are now available once again. KNOWN ISSUE: Once you open an article, the keyboard commands for the Feeds Interface may not work in certain cases.
• Improved legibility and visibility of a couple of icons.

Fixes

• Fixed recommendations not displaying the feed correctly.
• Fixed issue with loading images where narrower images would be enlarged to fix the max width as determined by the app.
• Fixed a 14 month old bug which could cause a crash when reloading feeds with one or more folders open.
• Fixed opening an Feed from the search results.
• Moving from open to open folder no longer crashes the app.
• Fixed the default sorting option for Unread showing the wrong icon.
• Fixed rendering on the launch splash screen.
• Fixed displaying article helper view on larger iPhones.
• Fixed the iOS 13 link tap bug: when scrolling in the article reader, if your finger scrolls by dragging a link, iOS would tell the app to open that link.
• Fixed the Search Bar not toggling in the article view correctly.
• Fixed the search previous button being enabled when viewing the first search result in the article.

Thank you for reading. If you have made it so far, please consider sharing https://elytra.app on your blogs, RSS Feeds and Social Networks, thank you.

2019 - Year in Review

2019 has been Elytra’s first full year in Production. It has since gone from v1.1 to v1.5 with work having begun on v1.6 before I left for a small vacation (following my wedding) in December. 

Over this year, Elytra’s UI has evolved significantly and with the v1.6 changes, it is about to become a whole lot better. Here are some quick stats over the year, reflecting on how Elytra has grown: 

• New Feeds: 2K+
• New Articles: 5M+
• New Users with Push Notifications Enabled: 700+
• Average Unique Articles read every day: 100+
• Average Unique Users active every day: 100+

To put these numbers into perspective: 

• New Feeds YoY Change: + 1666.67%
• New Articles YoY Increase: + 312.5%
• New Users with Notifications Enabled YoY Change: + 8750% 
• Average Unique Articles YoY Change: +850%
• Average Unique Users YoY Change: +1800%

I also managed to reduce Elytra’s Monthly server bill by 15% by optimising certain parts of the code while improving processing speeds. Once I get that figure down to approximately 40-50% (or revenue increases which bridges the gap), I hope to pass on the savings to Elytra’s users and finally introduce the Free Tier. 

I wish you all a very Happy New Year. May all your plans for the new year succeed.  

In-App Purchases Bug

A recent minor change in Apple's Receipt Verification process left a lot of existing and new users with a non-working app.

I did not catch this change until two users emailed me about being unable to use the app or sign up.

I noticed today morning that a lot of new users havent been able to sign up for the Free Trial either.

I have fixed this issue and new signups are now working as expected. If you tried signing up in the last two days or havent been able to use the app due to expired subscription errors, just restore your purchases from within the app.

I apologize for not catching this issue in time. Happy Reading.

Elytra Winter 2019 Update

Winter is coming... soon. The Elytra Winter 2019 update is already here though. 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. Here's the change log:

iOS App

What's New

• Added a new Bookmarks Manager. This is much more efficient system compared to the previous system and is much more scalable. This is a non-UI update so you'll see a lot of performance benefits from this.
• Sign in With Apple. If you're new to Elytra, you don't need to take any additional steps. If you've been using Elytra and are updating to the latest version, please head over to Settings > Account and link your account from there.
• Image Viewer: Tap on an image in an article to open it in a full screen image viewer. All images from the article are gathered in single place for easier viewing.
• Push Settings: View a list of publishers you've subscribed to receive push notifications from.
• Added Settings Sync to work in tandem with the web app. More on this soon.

Improvements

• Adding a new feed from the search interface now increments the unread count.
• Removing a feed now decrements the unread count.
• Recommendations interface now correctly shows the custom Feed name if one is set.
• Improves how the app handles & reacts to memory pressure warnings from the OS.
• The Author Interface now shows the author's name prominently and defers the blog's name to the subtitle.
• Drastically improved managing of unread counts in the app.
• Improved behaviour of the app when marking backdated articles as read.

Fixes

• Fixes push notifications opening the wrong feed.
• Fixes push notifications not opening the article on iOS 13.
• Fixed a bug where the app would re-sync all bookmarks even if they existed locally.
• Fixed the Settings icon for the Push Notifications row not showing up on some devices.
• Fixed the activity indicator persisting on screen when only one or no page exists for unread items.
• Fixed a potential crash when opening new feed interface.
• Fixes loading of unsupported image formats. Loading an SVG image would cause the app to crash.
• Fixed last updated date not matching the actual refresh date when manually refreshing through the User Interface. This only updated when fetching via background refresh.
• Fixed an issue that would cause a corrupted navigation bar in iOS 13.
• Fixes a crash which could occur when the Trial Interface was presented.
• Fixed linked images which would not render if they were contained inside an anchor blog with multiple other elements. These other elements were usually line-breaks preventing the entire block from rendering properly. Affected blog: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal..
• Removed webp support.
• Images are loaded using the same extension from the proxy as the source image.
• Fixed a small bug with the unread count when marking read automatically from the article reader.
• Fixed an issue with image loading preferences. "Never Load Images" now works properly in the Articles List & Article Viewer.
• Fixed some really nasty memory leaks.
• Fixed a crash that would occur when launching the app. This was a regression introduced in Build 275 of Elytra and OS 13.1.2.
• Micro.blog posts with images now show the image as a thumbnail in the articles list when settings are enabled for it.
• Fixed the colour of the summary label (iOS 13 only, correct on iOS 12).

API

I have been discussing with a few developers across platforms to open Elytra’s API to them so they can also build apps on top of it. I hope this takes off because that’ll mean more and more apps will be using a more private and secure way to read their favourite RSS Feeds. 

Other than that, I have made some significant changes to the API and RSS Feed Poller in this update. Here’s a quick change log of things which affects us as Elytra’s Users:

• The RSS Feed Poller now fetches more frequently and now fully complies with all HTTP caching mechanisms. Previously I only used ETags to know if a feed document was fresh or stale. But this sometimes resulted in unnecessary requests. If a Feed now tells that the content is to be considered fresh for a day, that will be respected. 
• Improved the WebSub protocol support. If you write on your own blog, I urge that you check if whatever engine runs your blog supports WebSub. If you’re using Wordpress, there are plugins with enable this feature. It’s simple to setup and you get free real-time notifications for your readers.  

Thank you for your continued support and feedback and criticism. I will continue to work on the iOS and Web apps through November. I’ll be unavailable on email in December but please feel free to get in touch, I’ll try to reply to you during that time whenever possible. Happy holidays. 

Elytra Winter Update - Back on Track

I published earlier this week that Elytra’s Winter update was delayed because of a major bug in the iOS 13.2 SDK causing the app to get rejected in review. Apple has since released updated tools which fix this issue. I’m submitting the update for review once again today. 

I have also been reading about faster review times since 1st November. I hope this trend continues. 

Elytra Winter Update Delayed

I had Elytra’s v1.5 build scheduled up pretty tight and ready to go. I submitted it to the App Store for Review and woke up today morning to learn that the binary was rejected because it was crashing. That’s fair. None of us involved want this to happen. 

I checked the crash log provided by the review team and it did not look good. However, a quick run on my devices and reading about this issue (yes! It has already been documented), I have to unfortunately conclude that I’m going to have to delay v1.5 until Apple fixes this issue. 

As soon as an update to Xcode is available, I’ll test things and dispatch a new build. The iOS 13.2 SDK fixes a bunch of issues I’ve been facing since the iOS 13.0 SDK so I hope it is worth waiting. 

iOS 12 Deprecation

Apple recently updated their Support page stating updated iOS 13 adoption metrics. Chance Miller (9To5Mac) wrote about it in detail. With over 50% on iPhones and 30% on iPads, this seems like a good time to deprecate iOS 12 support from Elytra. 

Elytra for iOS v1.5 will be the last pipeline to support iOS 12. v1.6 which is scheduled for Spring 2020 will drop iOS 12 support completely. Some excellent changes await in in v1.6 and I cannot wait to share more details with you. 

October 2019 Update

Half of October is over and I have a short update for you. 

Elytra v1.5 is on track and includes new systems for:

• Unread Articles
• Bookmarks
• General Articles

What’s new: How articles are loaded, and when they are loaded. I am delaying loading data from the network as much as possible so as to not be too eager to cache too early. This achieves one primary goal: reduced bandwidth usage. Also makes handling and expanding things easier for me in the app, but nothing you should concern yourself with. “Yay!” for both of us! 

I hope to have v1.5 ready to ship towards mid-November and close the pipeline by end of November.

I really did not know a better way to announce the next bit so I am going to sneak this one in here: I give you, a first look at Elytra for the Web

It is no where close to complete. I have barely gotten the article renderer to work with the basics. Lots of long coffee fuelled sessions still to go.

I decided to do the Web App first while I continue to work on the design of the macOS App and continue to improve the iOS app. The iOS app is pretty stable in v.1.5 now and has everything we need it to have, so now I can assign time to other platforms. 

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll share more progress on this blog so stay subscribed through the RSS Feed. I’ll share Alpha Testing notes about the Web App later in November.  

Moving to Sign In with Apple

For v1.5, which will be a supplementary update to the v1.4 Fall update, I’m considering moving the authentication system to Sign In with Apple. I’ve just finished testing this system and it works as advertised, however it took much much longer than it should have. 

It works well on iOS, as well as the web. This is very important for me as all previous mechanisms I had looked into to link the session in your browser to the iOS app had too many steps.

Sign In with Apple is by far the most efficient system and still ends up giving me a single User ID to work with, no emails, no names, nothing. So it also keeps in line with Elytra’s Privacy Policy.

These changes should become available in the following weeks as I publish the v1.5 Beta Builds to TestFlight  for preliminary testing. All new users will have to use Sign In with Apple ID. All existing users will have to migrate their account to it, which I’m trying to keep simple. 

v1.4 Fall 2019 Update

Fall/Autumn is here and this brings a new update for Elytra with iOS 13 compatibility. Given how the last two updates worked out, seasonal updates with one-time bug fixes updates is working out well, so I'll be sticking to this schedule.

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.

Now, for the change log:

What's New

• Full iOS 13 Compatibility.
• Native Dark Mode support.
• Most icons used in the app now use SF Symbols (by Apple).
• The Reader theme now has a Dark counterpart as well.
• Pop Menus have been repleaced by Context Menus which are new to iOS 13. Long Press/3D Press on Feeds or Articles to bring up the context menus.
• New Font: Open Dyslexic. This font is well suited for Dyslexic readers. I personally switch between this and the System font choice.
• Recommendations now shows a list of "Similar" feeds. Similar feeds are RSS Feeds which are followed by a user who follows at-least one RSS Feed which you follow too.

Improvements

• Improved networking with support for better caching mechanisms.
• Improved state restoration performance on iPhone 6S and 7.
• Since v1.1, Elytra would render only sections of the article at a time. In iOS 13, the scroll bar is now draggable, and Elytra's behavior would break this interaction. v1.4 will now render all text in an article without any memory overhead.
• Tapping on theme no longer reloads it.
• Improved the Gamma point for the Reader theme making it easier to read in darker environments (when not using the system dark mode).
• improved Voice Over support for Ordered Lists & Unordered Lists.
• Account deactivation is now handled directly through the API. This no longer requires you to send an email to deactivate the account which further ensures your privacy.
• Improved how Feed Renaming is handled by the app to ensure updates are immediately processed on screen.
• Enclosures are now added to the article viewer more reliably. Some articles may contain multiple images as enclosures which will be rendered as a Gallery.

Fixes

• fixed a crash that would occur when loading Youtube videos. Youtube has changed the API response which caused the crash. The new method is resilient to all such future API changes.
• fixed a state in the Article reader when using the toolbar where the previous and next article buttons would not update their states.
• fixed the height of Tweets embedded in articles. When no images are present in the tweet, the Tweet context adjusts to account for this.
• fixed the copy behavior when highlighting text and then tapping on copy. This used a custom implementation since iOS 12.1.4 and I've finally found the issue and fixed it. Took over a year ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
• fixed the odd behaviour when lauching the app on an iPad would not show the sidebar. This required a custom implementation in iOS 12 to make it work correctly but is no longer needed for iOS 13.
• fixed sharing of URLs from articles after long tapping on the URL to bring up the Share Sheet.
• fixed enclsoure images sometimes appearing twice in the feed. This may still happen in some articles (the same image will appear twice because they have different URLs).
• fixed handling of nested italic and bold descriptors. Previously, only one of the two would be used (latest taking the priority).