Elytra Blog

The simple RSS Reader. This blog publishes release notes, engineering and design details.

March 2022 Update

The first release of March, 2022 is here and includes a variety of improvements and bug fixes.

The is the first release to introduce Neptune, Elytra’s own full-text extractor based on modern technologies.

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 what’s new and changed in v2022.03.0:

New

  • The app now uses Neptune, a new full-text extractor, for fetching full-text content for articles.
  • [macOS] Added Read and Bookmark buttons to the toolbar.
  • You can now import and export your feed settings.

Fixes

  • Fixed articles rendering an image caption again as a normal paragraph.
  • Fixed an accessibility bug where large bodies of text would not be picked up by VoiceOver.
  • Fixed an accessibility bug where image captions would sometimes skip punctuations when using VoiceOver.
  • Fixed a crash that would sometimes occur when opening an article in its own window.
  • Fixed fetching full-text and reloading full-text content.
  • Fixed discarding loaded full-text content.
  • Fixed a critical issue where the app would start into an invalid state after setting up the account.
  • Fixed a crash which would sometimes occur when opening an article in the browser.
  • Fixed a crash which would sometimes occur when setting up an article.

Notes

If you see continous errors when fetching information about subscriptions, purchasing or restoring: please check if you have a custom DNS blocker enabled on your device. Some of these prevent connections to the service Elytra now uses to manage subscriptions. You may have to unblock api.revenuecat.com in your DNS blocker settings to get things to work.

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February 2022 Update

Elytra got multiple releases in February. This post outlines the changes across all those releases and acts as a monthly summary of things happening here.

Version Numbers

Starting with the recent releases, the versioning scheme for the apps has changed. The previous version numbers wouldn’t make much sense to either of us, except for identifying a particular release.

That’s not helpful if I have tens of builds for the same version and the macOS and iOS apps are running two separate builds for the same version.

Now, the versions are numbered as year.month.release, the latest release being 2022.02.4. That makes it easy for the both of us to identify when this build was released. For people browsing the App Store, it’s a clear indication of a regularly updated app as well.

Changes, Improvements and Fixes

Improvements

  • Added new keyboard shortcut to load Full-Text when an article is open.

  • Updated Japanese translations

  • Improvements to bulk marking read and improvements around on-device logging for the same.

  • Hint for externally opening articles

Fixes

  • Some fixes around images from specific hosts failing to load.

  • Fixed some issues around fetching full-text.

  • Fixed a bug causing full-text cover images not being drawn in the article view.

  • Fixed an issue with some attachments not appearing in articles.

  • [iOS] Added Logs viewer and export under settings.

  • Fixed swipe action on article not correctly marking an article as unread.

  • Clear local data correctly when resyncing.

  • Fixed shadows of the categories in the New Feed section.

  • Fixed a crash when processing block quotes in some articles.

  • Fixed a crash occurring after a successful OPML import.

  • Fixed crashes around importing feeds from OPML files.

  • Fixed feeds not mapping to folders when importing structured OPML files.

  • Fixed a bug with first time account setup causing multiple not-found errors in some cases.

  • Fixed a crash when syncing new articles which only contain a cover image.

  • Fixed adding a new feed directly to a folder.

  • Fixed feeds resync discarding feed settings.

  • Fixed feeds resync not remembering custom feed names.

  • Fixed shadows of the categories in the New Feed section.

I’m going to make this a habit: post a monthly summary at the beginning of each month so changes to app can be clearly tracked and if we missed out anything, we can go back and look at these logs to figure things out.

There are a few new repos I’d like to mention here:

  • Localisations All the translation files used by Elytra. If you find a mistake in a translation, please feel free to submit a correction there. You can also add a new language that you’re comfortable translating to. The contents of that repo use a permissive license, so other developers can also use translations that fit their apps from there.

  • IssueTracker The Issue Tracker is a public repo for tracking bugs and feature requests. If you have one, please open an issue there with the correct type so other users with similar requests can also chime in.

Thank you for reading, have a safe and cheerful day.

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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

Elytra's extra large widgets for iPadOS 15

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.
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