So I’m looking for a new client, specifically mobile, that’s FOSS, easy to use, allows for browsing communities on other instances easily (not just searching for instances, but actually viewing the list of instances, etc).
I’m a dev, so happy to put some legwork into it myself. So my question is - technically, is the UI tied to being run on an instance “directly”, or could it be detached, electron- or atom-ified and put into an app?
I can do the work, but before starting I’d like to know :-)
Photon can be installed as a PWA if that’s what you want. Photon v2 will take advantage of native features (👀)
Genuine question, what can there possibly be to improve to warrant a v2, its already so good.
Svelte (the JS framework I use) is releasing a really big v5 update which adds a lot of cool things and basically changes everything. It warrants a rewrite since I can make photon really fast with svelte 5, and the old codebase was limiting me in a lot of ways.
The biggest feature of this rewrite will be support for mastodon AND Lemmy, and thanks to the way I’m writing these adaptors, can support Sublinks, PixelFed, and almost anything if I write an adaptor for it.
I’m considering making this an entirely separate project (you might see it on my GitHub soon!) and maintaining photon separately, because I want to design this new one as an SPA for speed.
(👀)
(👀) indeed, definitely interested to see that.
If the new version is meant to be just better, why dont you just replace the old photon?
I want to start fresh, and this project will not use terminology from lemmy or mastodon specifically which will throw people off if I replaced photon.
Shameless github plug please so we can follow! 🙌
It’s very early, once it’s partially usable I’ll publish the github
You can “install” it as a PWA, and it’s basically an app at that point (for all intents and purposes).
Firefox doesn’t support PWA’s, so that’s a non-starter for me. I did try to get it to work, but I’d also want to tweak the UI scaling to make it a little more mobile-oriented - mainly scaling, and the sort of thing you can do with CSS and a few small tweaks. I suspect, as it’s got tablet and desktop scaling already, that could be done by adding another render target.
Firefox supports PWA on Android.
I… Didn’t know that. Thanks.
True about FF desktop, but the mobile version does. Lack of PWA support in FF desktop has been an ongoing criticism of mine.
There’s also Web App Manager that will let you approximate PWAs on FF desktop. It’s shipped with Linux Mint, but I have it installed on both Debian and PopOS. I hate using it, but it’s a decent option if you’re opposed to having Chromium installed (I use Chromium only for desktop PWAs since I hate Electron).
Its not tied to a specific instance, but have you had a look at the multiple mobile clients that exist already?
The last thing Lemmy needs in another mobile client.
Maybe contribute to https://github.com/aeharding/voyager ?
I’ve tried most of them . The ones that work the way I want, especially for easy portable UI/UX design are closed source. Sadly, none of them have a nice workable UI for easy use, or if they do, they’re really poor in another area.
This does all I want, with a nice UI and works nicely on mobile (with a few sizing tweaks).
I’m going to add to my comment above - this is for me. If someone else wants to use it, great.
