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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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As someone who never used Sync before, trust me, it will spike like crazy. I don't know why I never used it before but this an amazing experience. If you're reading this and trying to find a Lemmy app to use and don't care about FOSS, get Sync ASAP
As someone who has been using sync for reddit for years, the app has come a long way and learned a lot over that time, and pretty much all of that is transferred over to the Sync for Lemmy app. The sync for Lemmy app really has a huge head start thanks to the Sync for Reddit app.
I remember when Reddit was releasing their app, they appeared to base it on Sync, and you can still see a lot of that influence today. I remember the Sync dev thinking it was all over for his app, since Reddit is copying his design and surely has a team that can develop a good app, but obviously Reddit stole a good design and ruined it.
A lot of that came from Alien Blue too (rip)
how does it compare to jerboa and connect, ive been meaning to switch full time to connect but im just used to jerboa now even though I miss that swipe to next post feature
I've been using 5 different apps trying to find my favourite and I like Jerboa the most, until yesterday when I found Sync.
I tried Sync yesterday, but didn't have a lot of time to fiddle with it. What makes it so great everyone's excited? I checked it out and couldn't immediately see it having a clear edge over Jerboa and Connect (but it looked nice)
I was further thrown off by the fact that if I wanted to buy it, I'd need to pay for a yearly subscription (and in that case it didn't look cheap)
Honest question for who can answer
Probably the settings and ui smoothness are what I like. I set view to compact, switch the default touch action, move the image previews to the right and turn on colored indent lines.
After I open an image preview in connect it lags weirdly when I close it. Some of the text entry when commenting felt slightly jank to me, but I've been using sync for a long time.
Boost for Reddit all time user here so I'd never tried Sync before. When I took a dive to Lemmy, I tried Jerboa because it was the closest thing to Boost, great little app, but it think it needs some aesthetic polishing. The I tried Connect, and oh boy it's fast, functional, pretty (although it needs some design polishing also), and I made it look like the closest to the classic Boost list view.
Then Sync for Lemmy was released and I wanted to know what was all the hype about. How could it be as good or better than Boost for Reddit?, I thought. Well, two days and I'm seriously thinking if I ever going to switch to Boost for Lemmy when it becomes available. Blew my mind!
Yes, there are some things not quite there yet (not being able to submit posts the major flaw for me), but design wise is just aeons ahead of any other Lemmy app.
Posting is coming soon. He's just adding all the features, like crossposting, which I don't think any apps support yet.
It's just the new gold standard. Every app trying to compete for the biggest userbase will have to match or beat Sync.
Apps that ignore Sync and just target at FOSS minded users will share the remaining portion of the pie.
I copied this from another comment of mine. My advice is just give it a shot! The set up is super quick and the app just works.
For features: incredibly customizable material design. Extremely fluid. A lot of view customization. Comment drafts are something I missed on voyager.
Paid exclusive features: Cloud backups, user specific highlighting and theming, pull text from images, translate text, saved post folders (coming soon). No ads (yes the other apps don't have ads and are generally free).
I don't think I have any app, Lemmy or otherwise, that follows Material You so well.
I only used Jerboa, but sync is far superior. Jerboa was so glitchy, it worked about half the time. Sync is very smooth and the developer is on it about fixing any glitches that may pop up. I've been using lemmy with jerboa since reddit closed the door on 3rd party apps, and I couldn't be more relieved to have sync back.
Sync is Jerboa and Connect with the best ux :)
OK, convinced. Gonna try.
I always thought Sync for Reddit looked cool, but never found myself comfortable with it because RIF existed, and I always felt more comfortable with it.
I'm now using Sync and it is pretty great, but in my case it required some UI fiddling. It looks like Material Design 3, but I feel there's something wrong with the default values for font and text size nothing that is unfixable, but just... Weird
Tweaking things to meet your usage is fantastic in Sync. The dev has some weird defaults, but assumes you want to tweak almost everything.
That's honestly something I don't entirely get in the case of Sync. Like, there is nothing wrong with allowing users to tweak things, but Sync is like, really heavy on the Material Design 3, you look at it, and it is undoubtedly M3. Yet, there is always something odd about the way it uses it.
Take for instance, the Navigation Bar, under Material Design Guidelines it is meant for destinations. And yet, on sync it offers:
The main FAB is also weird, as it isn't the primary action of the screen, it just opens a bottom sheet to bring more "actions" (some of which are destinations...)
Like, Sync is a very good app, but it has a few odd things that are really weird.
I'm not super sure what you're complaining about with the navigation bar. It's well within the realm of what Google uses them for. Go look at the YouTube app for example. It has a button on the navigation bar that opens a bottom sheet as well. I'd argue Sync's use of it is more in-line with the guidelines than YouTube is, since the sheet for exploring is closer to a destination than a sheet for uploading different kinds of videos. The only odd thing is being able to convert the FAB into a navbar button, but at least it's an option and not a requirement.
YouTube Music and Google Podcasts also have an "Explore" option on the navbar, they just open a page instead of a bottom navigation. He probably could convert that sheet into a page to make it more consistent, but it's probably a sheet for usability reasons.
I think the point about the FAB is good in theory when talking about what the material guidelines say, but so few apps actually use the FAB, and I think Sync's implementation which allows for such robust customization is a good and fairly intuitive use of it, even if it doesn't exactly follow every guideline. It still does allow you to pick one primary action for it. It just also gives you more options.
YouTube doesn't exactly use M3, it has some similarities, but it is pretty much its own thing. The bottom area on YouTube is also not exactly the same as the Navigation Bar from M3, the Create Button is very clearly not the same as the rest. In fact, the entire bottom area looks sort of similar to the Bottom App Bar from Material Design 2
About YouTube Music and Google Podcasts. Yeah, they have an "Explore" option, but they work vastly differently from Sync, and it isn't even a matter of being a page vs bottom sheet. On Podcasts it works more like seeing the "Everything" feed than the explore sheet on Sync.
I think Sync would benefit from removing the "Explore" option, and changing "Posts" to "Everything", and adding new targets from "Local" and "Subscribed" if they want to continue using the Navigation Bar.
OR, they could swap it for a Bottom App Bar, and remove the "Posts" button, and treat the Inbox as being a subscreen rather than a main destination
I don't know enough about M3 to really comment on that, but when he updates things we cry about the changes. It looks like material design is 9 years old. He's been developing Sync for, what, 12 years and a bit? So we've probably requested a lot of stupid shit, but he's pretty good about listening. I know I was unhappy with some of the major UI updates and was happy he let me choose.
RIF is hot garbage for UI though.
Sorta...? Like, the outdated part is the visual, but the rest of the app is mostly fine, so you can spin the outdated visual as being minimalist or something like that. If you just updated the components to Material Design 3 it would be functional and fine.
The same couldn't be said for Tasker for instance, which is outdated in general, and just updating the components wouldn't fix much of the issues it currently has with the UX.
Settings shortcut: General > Base font size
I also struggled with this until I found this setting.
Ps. Be sure to set the other fonts to small, or it's going to be so large.
I really don't understand how so many apps get the default font size right, but Sync somehow appears to ignore system defaults or something? Like, I really like that it allows everyone to customize, but by default it looks like an app for ants
If I'm not mistaken Sync's dev is a relatively young guy (I recall reading he was a student a few years back) which likely means he hasn't experienced the joys of vision going downhill with age like many of us old farts have.
I'm old as shit now 👴🏻 (34)
That's one of the reasons I used to hate Sync lol.