Micro.blog

Shout out to Nick last name withheld for doing the % math and letting us know that it should be 48% not 50% in their country. You are technically correct, and that is my favorite type of correct! Rounding down instead of rounding to nearest 5%, just for you. 👍

@paul “Be an app developer,” they said. “It’ll be super fun,” they said.

They lied.

@paul Ah yes, modulo arithmetic!

@ambulephabus Nah love it, except when I hate it, but wouldn't do anything else, not that I could at this point.

@paul Same, honestly. Raise a glass to the unemployable self-employed!

@paul

@paul Ahaha oh I’m sorry. I was just worried you’d get in trouble for false advertising!

@nshady I wasn't joking I appreciated it, after getting a slight chuckle out of it. I have no doubt someone else would've complained once it was live.

@paul @nshady

Ok. I’m curious. What are the prices in your country? Good old Germany has 49,86% saving.

@zomtecos @paul

@nshady @paul that’s just 47,81%! Not even 48! ;)

We have 2,99€/17,99€. Which makes it 49,86%.

@paul how are people seeing the app prices ? I’ve checked the uk App Store and there is nothing there yet?

@drwormau @paul I believe they’re people in the TestFlight release pool …
Looking forward to seeing it when it gets released!

@james @paul ah ok. That makes sense. Thank you.

@paul as someone planning to release a subscription app later this year, I find the subscription view discussion fascinating. Also, any chance of supporting Micro.blog too?

@dejus David, I believe if you turn on ActivityPub support on Micro.blog your stuff will show up on Mastodon. If I’m accurate you could use Ivory then?

Not sure if that’ll work but I think it will?

Another big (pun intended) shout out to the tester running through the on-boarding process with huge ass fonts on a tiny ass phone. Definitely caught a couple places I screwed up.

@paul Not sure why double notifications happen

@paul Lol, I love that description. Getting the largest text to look right on an iPhone SE can be a challenge!

@Structure7780 it's a bug on a feature.

@paul Solution: only for iPhone Pro Max.

@paul oh i hope this means i’ll be able to set the privacy of posts on the iPhone mini soon 🙏

i know the compose screen has been a work in progress for awhile but i’d love to stop having to switch to the web to post followers-only 😅

@kat can you screenshot? I run a mini and its fine, though I guess if font size is really big there too might not be on screen, but I think should still be scrollable?

@paul 👋 SE 2 here. The beta subscription screen looked a bit oversized. (Honestly, I’m used to designers forgetting this phone exists.)

@paul yeah! i can’t dismiss the keyboard to get to the toggle thingy. once in a blue moon the keyboard gets closed and i can see that the toggle is there at the bottom left. i thought it was due to being on a mini because it’s there (above the keyboard) on my spouse’s phone. i’m also on iOS 15 still (keep meaning to do the update to 16), could that be why?

Thank you UIScrollView for saving my bacon on this one.

I spend a large portion of my day zooming fonts in and out, really wish Apple had a reset to default option.

@kat oh yeah I 100% bet that's why. Explains why I couldn't replicate something similar to that.

@paul thanks for doing the work! my eyes are getting worse and worse, and my font is getting larger and larger

@paul thoughts on why I get this error?

@paul let me know if you want any logs before i upgrade then! otherwise i will do that and see if it fixes it (and 🤦‍♀️ for not trying that sooner haha)

@paul It’s so beautiful! I need it!

@paul Apple should keep supporting the SE 1 form factor just to keep UI designers on their toes

@ezhik that's a bridge too far.

@paul Do you think it makes sense to just host most views in scroll views? Certainly makes them easier to adapt for different screen and font size combinations.

@paul reset to default would be so handy

@dml can't tell you how many times I've gotten “that looks wrong" when showing a design implementation because the size is off one or two notches.

@rhysmorgan pretty much, but for sure complicates other things.

@paul 🤔 I think you could use Shortcuts to make a “reset to default”

@paul I'm about to make your day. Go into iOS accessibility settings, scroll all the way down and pick "per-app settings". Add Ivory as an app. Then you can go in and turn on larger text and it won't affect any other apps on your iPhone. Even better, there is a "reset font size to default' at the bottom. This is how I do my a11y testing of my apps on my iPhone now.

@paul I suppose small phones are not long for this world anyway 😔

@MuseumShuffle this is all on the simulator though, I just want a menu option that does it.

@paul i know the feeling! especially on small devices or if you have Larger Accessibility Sizes enabled …

@paul is it worth my effort to pitch for the paywall and this screen to be combined into one long view? 😁

@paul @MuseumShuffle Bug @parrots, wouldn't surprise me if he could add that to Sim Genie if it doesn't have it already

@rjj you can pitch and we might do it, but it’s not a do today thing.

@paul Smart man.

@paul @MuseumShuffle Not sure if helpful, but did you know that you can preview any SwiftUI View in all dynamic size-types?

@rjj do send it in, if nothing else we did the $1.99 thing.

@paul That would be nice. I focus on SwiftUI and the dynamic type variants in the SwiftUI previews drastically reduced my simulator usage for testing my a11y functionality.

@MuseumShuffle @paul But this isn’t a SwiftUI exclusive feature, right?

I assume it works with UIKit/AppKit views too, you just have to wrap them with a ViewRepresentable?

@JagCesar Honestly no clue. I'm beyond rusty with UIKit.

@paul not big enough. need size 256

@paul @MuseumShuffle The RocketSim 🚀 app makes those sorts of things really easy on the simulator.

@paul

Might fix lower and upper end with

.dynamicTypeSize(.xSmall ... .xxxLarge)

@paul super! Glad it was helpful. The counterintuitive thing about Monthly is LTV is usually higher than Annual! So while the money isn’t upfront, it’s not bad to encourage it at all.

Consider removing “Example: “ here and if I tap continue while empty, fill as mastodon.social

@paul It might save you X00 support tickets, tweets, and 1-star reviews if you special case this error, and show your own “Mastodon.Social is Overloading. Try again in 60 seconds.” system alert back on the app UI that blames the right party. Or auto fire the FAQ.

@paul Way off the topic of zooming, but I love that elephant graphic.

@paul for paywall, it’s a new-ish pattern to have the features listed in long scroll view, behind a floating pay button.

Using the content you already have, you could likely put the translucent round rect poking up from button of the screen, and let the content flow under it? But that’s too semi-fancy.

The KISS way is one scroll view:

IMAGE
FLOATING ROUND RECT
FEATURE LIST

Prob +5% conversion rate alone?

@paul cc @mark Should be clear. If not I can draw it.

Some folks put “Not Now” in top right corner for this UX. I think you’d be okay with existing buttons though, since above the fold.

@paul I’ve got a mini and I use default text size but I still see apps truncate things a little too often

@rjj I'm going to let @mark look at all those. I just cook the pizza, he tells me where to put the ingredients.

We do show a section that let's you go the login help page when there's no login after bringing up the browser. Problem with being much more aggressive is that we can't really tell why it didn't login, server failure or user choosing cancel.

@paul Duh. Can’t believe I didn’t realize that. 🤦‍♂️

@mark moving the plans in the middle of first screen also let’s you list more features, cuz long is okay then. And a straight up list is actually a top 3 performing paywall layout. People just want a clear, concise list of the *limited features* they will/won’t get.

Replies
blurb

Post
blurb

Notifications
blurb

Themes
blurb

@MuseumShuffle @JagCesar yea this works, but can also have some strange side effects regarding autolayout and constraints.

@paul What is pricing?

@rjj @paul feels like it'd be better as a list of top-10 instances as "Type in" at the end. Although might be considered too centralized by some, I guess.

@paul I have a 13 mini if that’s a data point you need. Looking forward to supporting you on release!

@paul The accessibility inspector app has a screen for changing the font size with a button to restore defaults. It’s not as convenient as the options in Xcode but it’s better than nothing.

@paul Accessibility, ftw

@paul When I get that view (and now that I’ve “paid” I can’t check it again), it it seemed like there was no way out of it except to follow the steps to subscribe. IIRC, even choosing to demo or whatever to not subscribe on the list screen didn’t seem to make it go away but I could be wrong about that part.

@paul love that ball compression.

@paul @jeff This happens to me too. I put the dynamic type control in my Control Center for quick access.

@paul thank you for doing this. We all need to optimize like this more. Sadly way too little of this in big corps.

@fahrni yes, it’ll show up, but probably wouldn’t be able to log in to Micro.blog from Ivory without explicit support, unless @manton has done something magic?

@rjj @paul Clear and thorough messaging around Mastodon server errors is going to be so crucial for third party apps. I think developers need to account for every action potentially failing.

@paul if you run tethered from Xcode you can use the environmental overrides to set the text size then toggle it off to return to default.

@dejus @fahrni No magic. Anyone on Mastodon (including using Ivory) will be able to see and reply to your posts, but you can't sign in to Micro.blog directly from Ivory.

@dejus Technically yes, and I'm considering it. The problem is then you have things in the Ivory UI that make no sense for Micro.blog, like boosts, trends, etc.

@manton +1 for finding a way to work with Mastodon apps. If I could post to my hosted micro.blog, read my timeline and reply from apps like Ivory I’d be overjoyed. Maybe once support is there devs like Tapbots would be willing to show buttons like Boost in a disabled state to at least start the process of explaining what in the UIs don’t work for micro.blog users.

@humdrum Clients customizing the UI to show/hide features would be ideal. I'm just not sure if we should enable this until that happens.

@manton yeah it’s probably a bit of a chicken/egg situation. Why would devs take that step if there are zero applicable situations. The number of initial micro.blog users who would use this would probably be amiable and understanding to some of that confusion, but also maybe not enough people where it’s worth spending your time either 🤷‍♂️ so I get the hesitance.

@jsit @rjj yep, hard part with that is we'll only get a few for all the errors once we are out a while.

@RobW yeah I know, but I'm so used to the menu shortcuts that anything else feels just clunky. I wouldn't mind a command line argument or something like that to reset on launch, that'd work too.

@paul xcrun simctl ui {simulator id} content_size large

@manton on a similar note it would be nice to be able to use “follow” fields like the one castopod uses.

But I’m going to flag this on the castopod discord as well, wondering if they could provide a blah@blah.com username address to skip the middle man 🤔. Would be nice to see things get a bit less mastodon centric.

@MuseumShuffle @paul nice!

So when will you drop iOS15?

@PeacheyMcKeitch Hard to tell where the problem is for that... I can see it hit Micro.blog but I don't think it's following redirects.

@manton 🤔 I’ll see if I can convince the castopod devs to make it more micro friendly 😆

@paul @dml You are not alone. iOS 16.3 at 135%

@paul i updated to ios16 and I CAN SEE THE BUTTON NOW 🙆🏻‍♀️🙆🏻‍♀️🙆🏻‍♀️

now my only real problem is that i have three accounts with the same username on different instances and i can’t tell what i’m boosting to from the long-press… which granted i brought upon myself 😭