1y ago

I designed a Material You app for Lemmy

Hi everybody, I'm a UI/UX designer and I wanna contribute to the community here with my expertise. Here is a quick prototype for a Android Lemmy app with Material You Design, it's a simple and customizable app. With this app, I also want to improve the experience when exploring different servers.

Obviously, this is just a concept, so if any developer interest, I'm very willing to collaborate with 🫡 . Vice versa, if anyone stucks with designing his/her own Lemmy client, just reach out to me and I will give you a hand.

Here is a quick demo of some basic features: https://vimeo.com/843481714?share=copy

And here is the figma file if you wanna take a look: https://www.figma.com/file/ZBR30l0ZcKuyKMPjeDmvdF/Lemmy-Android-app?type=design&node-id=53526-31054&mode=dev

78 comments

Personally prefer to read the title before the image. It's one of the reasons I don't use the Connect app
- The connect app now has that as a setting, if that makes a difference for you.
  
  Cool. Thanks
- Noted. I was also considering where should I put the title as well. This is just a quick prototype to find out whether any dev is interested in collaboration, so just take it with a grain of salt 😉
  
  top would be preferable.
  often the title is needed in order to understand the picture - or the picture is the "punchline" to a joke set up by the text.
- I'm using Connect and your can meme the title be before the image in the settings, that's what I did
  
  Thanks, must be a recent update. I'll check it out!
- Me too. That's what keeps me on jerboa for now.
  
  I switched to Liftoff. I was on Jerboa for the last few weeks as I figured things out, but liftoff is much smoother and has yet to give me an error code
- This is something that has been disturbing me with Thunder app, Connect in their latest versions added a switch for this!

Great work, but super clickbait title.
- lol, my bad, I used to be a content writer so it kinda runs in my blood =))) anw, updated for more accurate title

This looks really great! If you're interested in contributing to an app you should check out Liftoff!
We're totally open source and community contribution driven and we're moving fast! But we're lacking designer contributions!
If you're interested check out our open GitHub issues/enhancements:
https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/issues
- Got that, I'm checking Matrix so we could have a chat
- I just discovered liftoff last night on the Playstore. Finally really getting into Lemmy now that I have a good app to use.

The apps are certainly in need of all the help they can get. I have Lemur and Jerboa, and they're both janky as all heck.
- Liftoff is perfect.
  
  Liftoff is pretty great. Devs keep making improvement every day.
  I am still waiting for Sync for Lemmy to come out, but Liftoff might convert me.
  
  Does liftoff look different on Android? I feel like it’s ugly as sin on iOS.
  
  Liftoff is better but compared to the greats that existed in the reddit ecosystem these are very crude. The platform just needs time for devs to catch up to the 10+ years they had invested in Reddit development. The dev behind sync for Reddit has been hard at work on an client for Lemmy with as much feature parity as possible.
  
  You misspelled "Connect"
  (They're both pretty good actually)
- Thunder and Connect are better than Jerboa, haven't tried Lemur
  
  Using thunder now. It's not perfect, but it's the best experience for me that I've found so far.
- Memmy on iOS has been great so far.
- Have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ or https://lemmy.world/post/465785
- I'm currently using connect for lemmy. It works fine, but I still have to use the web version to jumping between servers, which is why I come up with this idea.
  
  Hmm, connect let's me switch between accounts on different instances just fine.
- I'm really enjoying wefwef. It's smooth and works well. No weirdness or issues on my end.

Wow that front page looks like sync 😁
- lol, I use basic components from material library so it should be familiar :)))

"Video is not rated. Log in to watch"
Nope.
- Can you try again? I think it's fine now
  
  Still not working for me without logging in
  
  'fraid not. Still requires login :(
  
  Works for me without login in
  
  It works for me.

I'm putting the final touches on an app using material design. I've broken away from cards and haven't even considered a light mode yet, but I've been pretty unhappy with the search/explorer
This just got me unstuck on it, so thanks
- I don't know why, but this exchange felt of fucking romantic. Keep up the good work you amazing people!
- Awesome, glad I can help. I also have some design outside of the cards, you can check it out in the Figma link for more inspiration

I think Liftoff would benefit for a Material You UI.
- Same. One of the reasons I don't use it. I think a reason they don't priotise is because it supports both android and iOS. Not all users would see it.
  
  Yeah I get it, although Thunder is available for both platforms as well, and Material You looks awesome.
- Only reason I'm not using it

I'm a fullstack dev building my own app for Lemmy. I'd be interested in opening a dialogue if you're interested. UI/UX is my weak point :P
- Awesome, I just sent u a message

Just like wefwef is nice for iOS, this seems nice for android
- Wefwef works great on Android. Supposedly it looks like Apollo, but so what?
  
  It very much looks like an iphone app. All the text and the ui elements fit apples theming and looks out of place in android.
  Not to say it doesn't work well or isnt a good app, because it is, but a lot of us are looking for a unified experience.
  I'm using thunder, which fits in nicely. Uses Material You theming as well
  
  hell i use wefwef on my linux tablet
  
  It works well even on my linux desktop. But in terms of design fits best into iOS

very cool! we need more ux/ui designers in open source and free software!

This is beautiful, and a perfect example post you used there. I know it’s not a release but it makes me wish I had an Android phone to test it anyway lol

Looking very good. I’m on iOS, but I would definitely use an app that look as good as that, as long as it performed good as well.
Congratulations and keep up the good work.

Keeping a native OS UI design language for an app is very nice. Apollo was a great example of this!
I'd love to see Android's version of the same thing.

I like the look. One thing I would like to see is integration of the community search tool to make discoverability easier. Something that shows what server each community is on but also will allow you to search across servers in case you don't know where things are, and a way to view the list of all communities if you want.

Hi there, thanks for this. Could you rate the video? It's asking me to logon without a rating.
- Fixed, could you check again
  
  Yes that’s great. I looked at the Figma file but seeing stuff moving around on a screen is very powerful. I think this looks like a huge improvement and it tones down a few of the stronger elements making it pass better as an iOS app. Have you worked in iOS at all?
  Stu has already put a mock-up of some of these ideas in place and it’s looking very exciting!

hey this looks really similar to a proposal that was made on github for jerboa. Jerboa is also really focused on material UI so maybe it would be best to combine efforts and help each other out.

Wow! Nice one. I think if we all keep contributing Lemmy will be like VLC. Let's do it !!

78 comments