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 v2.6 is now available

The first release of 2022 is here and brings some incredible performance enhancements to Elytra. This is the culmination of all the work I put into the app’s engine in 2021.

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 v2.6.0:

New

  • Moved to a new of storage engine (Apple’s own) which is much faster, reliable and will help implement a lot of the upcoming features in Elytra.
  • New Small widget that shows the latest unread article from a single feed of your choice.
  • New onboarding flow
  • The app is now localised for 10 languages. If you spot any mistakes in the text translations, please get in touch.
  • Reset Account: You can now reset parts of or your entire account without having to create a new account.
  • Added Source Han Serif font for improved support in CJK articles.
  • macOS: Added a “Reset App” item under preferences.

Improved

  • Notifications will now include the cover image if the article includes one.
  • Major improvements to handling and managing subscriptions in the app. See note below if subscriptions data fails to sync.
  • Widgets now directly load data from the common data store, so they update much faster and sync more reliably.
  • macOS: Added Internet Access Policy items to give descriptive messages of connections in apps like LittleSnitch and MicroSnitch.
  • macOS: Fixed spacing for items in Preferences.
  • macOS: Improved full-screen support for videos in Big Sur. Toggling full-screen on a video will now open it in the OS’s fullscreen, not limited to the app window’s area.

Fixes

  • Fixed a bug where favicons would sometimes never load for a feed even with a valid URL.
  • Fixed loading indicator showing when no where articles available (after switching sorting order).
  • Opening articles from feeds with reader mode enabled now works across all article list types (unread, today, folder…)
  • Fixed a crash that would occur on opening certain articles with deeply nested content.
  • Fixed a critical range overflow bug when applying attributes to paragraph content.
  • Fixed a bug where toolbar article navigation buttons would not update after changing the article.

Temporary Removals

Due to some bugs in modern systems, the following have been temporarily disabled:

  • Hide bars on scroll (iOS and iPadOS)
  • Search on macOS

If you notice any translation errors, please feel free to reach out to me on support@elytra.app. I’m continuously working with wonderful people who are helping with translating the app and introduce new languages to Elytra. If you’d like to help, you can check out the instructions here.

Notes

If you see continuous 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 unblock api.revenuecat.com in your DNS blocker settings to get things to work.

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Hello, App Store

Elytra 1.0.0 is now generally available on the App Store. There’s also a shiny new website. 

From having of the most volatile, overwhelming pre-releases announced on Twitter, to getting some really cool, critical, and supportive Beta Testers, to the Subscriptions rejection a few weeks earlier, my journey with Elytra has been an absolute roller coaster.

When I started working on Elytra back in November I had no idea what to expect. I was very surprised that people really yearned for a new RSS Reader option. The responses on Twitter only made by presumptions more concrete: I want this. A lot of people want this. This needs to be on the App Store. 

There a lot of changes between the last Public Beta build and the App Store version. I wont go into too much detail here, but rest assured, it’s a more stable app. It isn’t completely stable though which is why I have version 1.0.1 ready to go for Review as soon as 1.0.0 is released. 

During the Public Beta, people sent me a lot of emails with feature requests, ideas and suggestions to make Elytra a better app, a better product. I’ve been communicating with a lot of people back and forth to evaluate and solidify these ideas and I am very excited to start working on those. 

As always, please feel free to email me or tweet/toot at me with ideas, questions or just stop by to say hi. 

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Realtime RSS

Yes, you read that right. Thanks to the WebSub spec, Realtime RSS is not only possible, but wildly scaleable if implemented correctly. Yeti is making an attempt at that. 

It will not only enable Yeti to:

  • fetch posts in realtime from the publisher (your favourite websites)
  • update content stores soon after posts are published
  • spend less resources on polling publisher websites

but also

  • enable you to subscribe to your favourite publishers
  • receive near-realtime notifications1 from these publishers
  • have the app update itself in the background when the system determines so

The implications of the above are grand. 

If the above holds true, which by means of this post: I am looking for feedback on the above, I not only save money, but enable you (and myself) to get real time notifications from publications which really matter to me. As since Yeti will be paid there won’t be any add-on cost you’ll have to pay to get this. It’s all part of the package.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter in the comments section below.

  • You can choose which publishers to receive notifications from, just like you would on Youtube. ↩
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