A couple more fixes are incoming:

1. The weird layout issue caused when tapping a username in the comments.
2. GIFs will no longer be automatically rendered as animated images anywhere in the app, except when opening the image viewer.

I want to give a bit more context about 2.

GIFs (and animated WebP images) have been the most common cause of crashes and UI freezes in Bean. The last couple of days have been particularly bad as this image of the Lemmy version of r/place has been shared.

This image is 12.4MB, animates for over 2 minutes, and (most importantly) is almost 3,000 frames. I can't even tell you exactly how many frames as both Preview and Photoshop froze on my Mac when trying to open the image.

The reason the number of frames is important, because a GIF is just a container for multiple images. Each frame is an individual image that needs to be decoded and rendered on the screen, and it turns out when there are a lot of them at 1000 x 1000px it is impossible to decode performantly.

Bean uses SDWebImage to download, cache, and render images behind the scenes. It's a fantastic library that is the de facto standard when working with remote images on iOS or macOS. Even with the progressiveLoad and scaleDownLargeImages options enabled, SDWebImage just cannot render certain images without iOS sounding the alarm and firing an OOM exception — especially when that image is 12.4MB and 3,000 frames.

At the moment, Bean will crash if you attempt to open this image. I have even tried working around this and rendering it in a web view, or using another library — FLAnimatedImage. Neither of these solutions worked and believe me, I'm not happy about that (seriously, I really hate GIFs now).

In the coming days, I'll be pushing another update that will check for the size of the image before deciding whether to animate it or not. When not animated, SDWebImage only decodes the first frame of a GIF which is no issue at all.

I know this isn't brilliant, as in the ideal world every image would be viewable within Bean, but it's the best solution I can think of to avoid a single image crashing the app.

The hacker theme looks so amazing. Thank you so much. Let me know if there is a link to donate. Would be more than happy to do so

Issues with opening communities within the community tab. No action happens when clicking on a community

Tap to collapse comments is no longer working for me.

Changelog August 6th

Build 2023.08.06.22.41

• Added the ability to sort comments.
• Added a default comment sort to the Filtering settings.
• New theme: Midnight
• New theme: Forest
• New theme: Hacker
• New font: Futura
• New font: Menlo
• Fixed correct font styles not loading in the markdown editor.
• Fixed http:// and https:// links automatically being detected.
• Updated dependencies including SDWebImage. Should solve some crashing images with WebP and SVG parsing.
• Stopped reloading Inbox on focus as it seemed to be causing some glitches. Will reassess later.

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Push notifications are now also functioning as expected. Please test and let me know if you encounter issues.

Some more feedback:

• search for comments would be nice
• I think the splash screen should only be a skeleton of the tab bar/nav bar. The icon might not fit the user chosen app icon, also it makes the app feel slower. Apple’s HIG also recommends the skeleton
• images in the feed should have the full height (otherwise most memes and posts aren’t readable without a tab and dismiss)

Minor feedback on theme:

Is there a way to use accent of the main color theme to color the upvote and reply swipes

I’ve pushed an update to the way images are rendered tonight which I’m hoping will finally (finally), finally (FINALLY) fix the crashing issues caused by GIFs and animated webp images exhausting memory allocation.

I have noticed that it’s broken the full height images option (sorry about that) so I’ll be patching that back in tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’d you encounter any issues with GIFs, please let me know.

More GIF changes

Build 2023.08.07.11.30

• Added a badge to the card view to show that an image is a GIF.
• GIFs are now played in a WebKit view. The transition when opening is glitchy so will be improved soon but… No crashing! (famous last words?)

Changelog August 3rd

Build 2023.08.03.23.29

• Added the ability to edit and delete comments.
• Added a new context menu on press and hold of comments.
• Added the ability to delete a post. Known issue: it’s not immediately removed from the list and requires a refresh.
• Added the ability to edit a post.
• Deleted or Removed posts are now filtered from post lists.
• Increased maximum font size on the slider to 140% from 120%.
• Increased the bottom padding on the comments list on themes with a translucent tab bar.
• Tapping a comment in the Inbox will scroll to that thread on the post view.
• Tapping a comment in the Inbox will highlight that comment in the post view.
• Removed email parsing from Markdown.
• Removed the “View Anyway” button on blocked communities as it doesn’t work.
• Added Markdown parsing for spoilers.
• Added a new button to the Markdown editor for writing spoilers.
• Added a new Headline post view.
• Added section for account settings in preparation for more there.
• Added video support.
• Added a welcome screen.

I’m all registered for the notifications. Notify me if you dare!

In the last update, I’m no longer able to pin/unpin communities. I added a lifetime subscription.

Since the last update, communities and comments haven’t been loading quite right. Always possible that it’s a .world problem, but I’m using Voyager right now without any apparent issue. I’ll try again in a couple hours and see if there are still issues.

Edit: I take it back. More exploring on Voyager reveals the same problems. Looks like it’s a .world issue.

And, not to bombard you, but there seems to be an issue with replies showing up. I know there are a few replies to my comment shown in the image, but they’re not appearing in Bean. It seems to be a problem in posts with a lot of comments, at least as far as I can tell.

Running into a bug where images don’t load in the feed (seemingly random) but load fine when post is opened. This is one example of a post that showed a blank image icon until clicked

https://lemmy.ca/post/2617601

Full height image preview seems to have stopped working in latest build. I’m seeing clipped images even with the option toggled on. Worked fine in previous build. This post is one example:

https://lemmy.world/post/2676679

I'm having problems with the communities tab in the most recent release. Entries are sometimes getting duplicated or showing out of order, and I'm experiencing stuttering and slow loading. The app is slow to respond if I try to navigate away from the communities tab- sometimes taking several clicks or seconds to respond- while responsiveness in other tabs is normal. The battery usage has also been noticeably higher than before. I'm on an iPhone 11 pro, 16.5.1.

• The duplication seemed to continue the longer I stayed in the tab and would cause jumping to other areas without any input on my part.
• Duplicate entries are clickable links that lead to the correct communities.
• The issue seems worse the more communities I'm subscribed to. I'll attach screenshots from the account with the most subscriptions, but other accounts show only one or two duplicates and my account with the fewest subscriptions didn't have any issues. I unsubscribed from a few on this account and am no longer seeing duplicate entries but am still experiencing the slow loading/high battery usage.
• Unrelated but certain subscriptions are missing from the tab, notably !kbinMeta@kbin.social. This community shows up under my communities in other apps I'm testing, but not in Bean; maybe because the display name starts with a / and the other apps are sorting by the actual link?