Skip Navigation

Remote View

Liftoff! @lemmy.world

liftoff @lemmy.world

2y ago

Are you ready for Liftoff?

github.com liftoff-app

liftoff-app has 2 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

Limbo and Limmynade have joined forces, and will continue development together as Liftoff!

The past couple of weeks have been tremendously exciting times for all of us as events elsewhere have led to a massive growth in interest in and usage of Lemmy.

Our two separate projects both started with the intention of bringing an existing open-source code base Lemmur up to date, with the aim of helping new users to have a great first experience of Lemmy, while giving existing users access to many rich features. As soon as we became aware of each other we realised that we would work much more effectively by combining our efforts. Read more about what makes Liftoff! special.

We are:

Zach—Extensive experience in Enterprise full stack architecture and infrastructure.

Michael—Many years experience of developing and managing commercial and open source software projects.

Liftoff! is written in Dart for API support and Flutter for front-end development, meaning that it can run wherever Flutter runs. Our primary targets right now are Android and iOS, but the sky’s the limit!

Our current development priorities are to:

Ensure that the app runs robustly on iOS and Android platforms.
Identify and address any major bugs affecting key functionality
Work to improve the user experience on both platforms.
Release 1.0 version

Beta builds now available on TestFlight and will soon be available on F-Play and Google Store. (Note that the TestFlight page still refers to it as Limbo, but it does indeed install as Liftoff!)

Liftoff code is made available under GPL2.0 and can be found at https://github.com/liftoff-app

We have already had tremendous support from enthusiastic Lemmy users as separate projects and we look forward to continuing to work with you all. Code contributions, bug fixes, issue reports and suggestions are all welcome, so please join us on our journey into the unknown!

Lemmy Apps @lemmy.world

Are you ready for Liftoff?

github.com /liftoff-app

18 4

72 comments

Hey there! (developer of Thunder here)
I would just like to pop in and say congrats on getting Lemmur up and running! I'm happy to see more Dart/Flutter apps popping up. Since both Thunder and Liftoff use Flutter, this could also be an opportunity for our projects to help one another in good ways - maybe starting off with the lemmy-dart api
I am currently using a very basic lemmy-dart library that I built from scratch, but this could be the opportunity to migrate to using your fork
- You'd be more than welcome, and don't feel shy about picking through the code for ideas and things you'd like to do better! We'd welcome any suggestions or contributions you make.
  I have to say Thunder is looking good too!
  
  Same here, feel free to look around through Thunder's codebase as well to gather any ideas, and provide any suggestions or feedback! I've been learning a lot about Flutter and Dart through this so far, and it's been a fun time for the most part :D
- Liftoff is awesome. Best app on Android among others for me. Kudos to developers ❤️

Zach here! (The old lemmynade dev)
Super excited to move this forward with Micahel! Thanks everyone for the support and engagement so far!
- Michael here, right back at ya!
  Sad to see Limbo fade away, but we've got places to go!

Kudos to the devs! I use Liftoff on Android and i think this is it for me!. IMO the number one thing that will help the fediverse gain adoption is good mobile apps, I'm leaving reddit because of two things:
Fuck you u/Spez and u/ModCodeOfConduct
RIF is fun is shutting down and i do most of my reddit time on my phone.
The app is in early stages but i trust that you'll make it great!

Congrats on the merger. Love the new name and logo 🚀

It's really good, I've tried a few apps and I'm sticking with Liftoff!
My only request rn is a transparent or white nav bar because Pixel.
Thanks to all involved 🖤
- Could you explain what you mean by that request? Happy to log it but I don't send much time on Android so I don't understand it :-)
  
  Sorry, I didn't see your reply till now.
  Gesture navigation on Android features a small black bar at the bottom of the screen, it's transparent (like iOS) most of the time but devs specifically have to account for it, either make it a specific colour or transparent or it just appears black, which is quite ugly when the surrounding app is white or any other colour.
  Some manufacturers like Samsung allow you to remove the bar completely, but on others including Pixel there is no option.
  https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/166478545 - as you can see, lots of people have issues!
  Android 14 beta has a transparent nav bar option (currently only sort of working) so hopefully this will be one less thing for devs to worry about in the future.
  Thanks for your work on this app, it's fab!
  
  Guess have to do with the blueish color of navigation bar at the bottom. Would be better if we could customize it. Kudos to devs!

This is great, even in its current state it's head and shoulders above other options. I had started something myself as a pet project, but you guy have already made a start on my list of feature ideas and I see you're open to pull requests.
I'd love to see a bit of an AMA style roadmap discussion, I can see from the git issues there's plenty of bugfixes and feature requests, but I'm curious if you have any long term design, feature or Ux ambitions?
Personally I'm more frontend/Ux than developer, sadly as a product owner I rarely get to write code in work these days so my skills are limited to 'pet projects'. Do you think there'd be any interest in adopting material3 or was you going for more of a device agnostic approach (or more likely is it a leftover from Lemmur)?
Also, You mentioned F-Droid, no ambition to put it on Google Play? I know it's early days but it's relatively simple and currently there's a complete lack of options for the average user? I personally think this is a huge barrier for people coming from reddit - the kindling for the exodus was lack of third party app integrations but when you look at Lemmy, there's basically only 1 app and it's not great from a Ux perspective.
Good luck with the next steps, wishing the project success!
- Love your thoughts in here. Google play is coming, review is pending. Should be any day now.
  About the roadmap and UX design vision right now we just want a robust app that we want to use ourselves. We're almost there.
  For longer term vision and design direction you should join our matrix and we can have these discussions!
  #liftoff-dev:matrix.org
- I just opened an issue to start off a discussion on some of this: https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/issues/65, please have a look!

Loving the app so far, only thing that’s bugging me is when toggling on the AMOLED dark mode the feed has no separation between topics. I’m normal dark mode the cards are visible and creates a nice break between posts.
- It's on our todo list :-)

Great job with the app!
The refresh rate does seem to be locked at 60fps which makes switching to the app feel a bit jarring and stuttery. (I'm on a 1+ 8 Pro, 120hz screen)
- undefined> The refresh rate does seem to be locked at 60fps which makes switching to the app feel a bit jarring and stuttery. (I’m on a 1+ 8 Pro, 120hz screen)
  I believe that's the case. I've raised an issue on GitHub.

Congrats for this wise decision. It's the best lemmy app already now, awesome :)

Hello, Nice to hear about the merging! I can login to Lemmy.ml, but not to Lemmy.world, is that a known issue?
- Check if your password length exceeds 60 chars. Lemmy-ui has a char limit of 60chars whereas all flutter apps transmit your whole password even if >60chars. I've just been thru it with a dev https://github.com/hjiangsu/thunder/issues/52
  
  This didn't work for me. I reduced my character length to 15 and even removed all special characters but I still couldn't login with my lemmy.world account, it just spins. If I put in an incorrect password it does tell me that its incorrect. It just doesn't ever accept the correct one.
  
  Thanks!

I'm testing Limbo right now, and was about to send a suggestion via TestFlight, but since it concerns the UI I think it should be more useful to the community to leave it here.
I am not sure about the rounded corner cards with dark gray shadows you use to separate posts, since we only see top and bottom shadows and it makes the separator look really weird. Maybe it's the shadow that's too dark on the white background I don't know.
What do you think?
- There's some options in Settings you might like :-)
  
  Thanks!

Just installed it on my device it seems to be working great, good job guys, looking forward to see how it evolves.
- Hello, Are you on Lemmy.world? I'm having trouble logging in
  
  Hi, check this comment. https://lemmy.world/post/520520/comment/508830 It's related to the length of your password.
  
  Hey there, yes I am on world and I had no issues logging in or subscribing.

I had already been using Limbo for a while and loved it. Glad to see you guys working together on this!

Will Liftoff support kbin?
- We have a placeholder issue for it, but haven't had time to look at it yet, so bear with us :-)

I just installed it as well after setting up Obtanium and it already seems much less buggy than Jerboa. Thank you!

Replying from the latest android version, added an instance & logged in without any issues, looking good...👍🏻

Good stuff! Using it rn

Ah didn’t mean to delete my comment. As for us that aren't great at puters, when will we be able to download it from App Store without any particular dev or beta things? 😄
- You really should give TestFlight a go, it’s pretty painless. If you follow the link it offers to install Apple’s TestFilght app, which then takes care of downloading the actual app for you and automatically updating it as needed.
  Either way we’re really enthusiastic to get the app into people’s hands, so we’ll be making a full release as soon as we’re comfortable that any major bugs have been found and squashed!
  
  Since I had issues giving feedback but it would be neat if you were able to do it similar to Apollo for the swiping on posts. Might have not described it good but in general.
  As a user While I do a mild swipe left on a comment So I can reply
  Hard swipe left So I can save post
  Mild swipe right So I can give a upvote
  Hard swipe right So I can give a downvote
  
  Wow, that was much easier than expected. Installed it right now. Thank you and sorry for being dense :)

This is the best app so far! One issue I'm having with it is that the keyboard covers the text box I'm typing in so it makes it difficult to see what I'm typing.
I'm on android.
- Thanks! I've reported the issue you mentioned: https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/issues/129

I think this is the most 'complete' android client for Lemmy right now! Feels the most seamless to me at least
Walking users through registering an account here would already make this recommendable to people upset about 3rd party reddit apps going down I feel.
- Thanks! I've raised that as an issue with a very clear deadline :-)
- Walking users through registering an account here would already make this recommendable to people upset about 3rd party reddit apps going down I feel.
  That's a good idea. We've already made a couple of changes to improve the onboarding process, but there's still work to be done.

Doesn't seem to want to install on the pixel 7, says not compatible with my phone.
- Try the .APK that has arm64 in the name.
  
  Ahhh thank you!

Out of all the Lemmy apps I tried, this is the best one so far. Hope you guys will come up with a way to clearly separate posts when using the amoled theme. And maybe a toggle to choose how to collapse comments, between tap and tap&hold.
- They're both issues on GitHub :-)

Is there a way to assign a default YouTube player? It looks like when a YT link is pressed it automatically opens YT in a browser. Is there a way t o force it to always open Newpipe?
- Looks like it's in progress: https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/pull/35

Can I choose which account I comment from? If I have my sh.itjust.works acct and lemmy.ca acct signed in I'd still rather comment on Lemmy.ca communities with my sh.it acct since I check it more often.
The feature is cool for seemlesly interacting with beehaw but otherwise I'd like more control.
Great app otherwise though.
- We're certainly looking at how we make the multi-account feature work better for people, thanks for the example.
  
  Yeah, I had trouble wrapping head around some of it at first. If I understand when I select a different instances local feed I'm also automatically signing in to that acct?

By far the most complete app for Lemmy. Huge respect for the dev team.

72 comments