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I present the first named release of the Friendica mobile/desktop client: Relatica. It is still very much a work in progress but I'm going to start opening it up for beta usage (early beta). For iOS that will mean me letting up to 100 people into the inside testing team (Apple's limit). For the other platforms I'll be posting binaries/packages/install instructions for Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows in the coming days as well. I also setup a Relatica Matrix room for interactive discussions with me and other users. The README on the GitLab repo will have all those sorts of details. Enjoy! #friendica #FriendicaDev #relatica #flutter #DartLang #fediverse https://gitlab.com/mysocialportal/relatica
Screenshot of the first release of the Relatica Friendica mobile/desktop client running on Windows.
#friendica #dartlang #fediverse #flutter #friendicadev #relatica
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
Awesome! I'll add you to the list.
Cord
Cord  
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i'd like to apply to beta test it on iOS and iPadOS.
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
Feel free to send me a DM here with your email address or on matrix. I'm @hank:myportal.social on there.
Shelenn Ayres
Shelenn Ayres  
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@Hank G ☑️ Congrats getting to this milestone!
@Hank G ☑️
macoud12 :windowsxp:
macoud12 :windowsxp:  
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The app looks good. Do I see some Material Design elements in it?
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
Thanks! Yep it is using the Material elements not Cupertino elements provided by Flutter. While eventually I'd like to make it look more native to each platform, for the time being I'm in more of a capabilities focused mode. So essentially all the apps will be Material looking for the foreseeable future. However one thing I'm going to be addressing in the very near future is making it look better in large format modes (tablets, desktops, etc.) using responsive design techniques.
macoud12 :windowsxp:
macoud12 :windowsxp:  
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Luckily, Material Design will fit in quite nicely with the older apps on my phone.
Seph Harrison♊ ✅
Seph Harrison♊ ✅  
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@Hank G ☑️ Yay, I know there's several clients for Android already, but none of them are particularly good or reliable.
@Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
That's unfortunate about the state of those clients :(. I figured it may be like that though since I see a lot of energy more towards using Mastodon clients with the Friendica servers. For me that didn't cut it because of very specific Friendica UX and features that have no mapping to Mastodon nor ever will. So I figured I'd start a new one.
Darth Tiktaalik
Darth Tiktaalik  
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@Hank G ☑️ @Seph Harrison♊ ✅ Yeah, fedilab is a great app when you're using Mastodon accounts with it but a nightmare as a friendica client.
@Hank G ☑️ @Seph Harrison♊ ✅
Seph Harrison♊ ✅
Seph Harrison♊ ✅  
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@Darth Tiktaalik @Hank G ☑️ Nope, I'm thinking of Dica and Friendiqa, both are dedicated Friendica clients, but they really don't work very well.
@Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik
Ji Fu
Ji Fu  
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@taur10 both of which just recently resumed development after significant stagnation with the renewed interest in 'verse resulting from #twitterMigration
#twittermigration
Seph Harrison♊ ✅
Seph Harrison♊ ✅  
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@Ji Fu Well, that's good to hear, but with how poorly things functioned, I can't say I hold out much hope.
@Ji Fu
Till
Till  
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@Seph Harrison♊ ✅ @Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik I'm using libreFriends, but that doesn't seem to be much more than a dedicated browser.
@Hank G ☑️ @Seph Harrison♊ ✅ @Darth Tiktaalik
Cătă
Cătă  
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@Seph Harrison♊ ✅ Yep, I resorted to DiCa since it is the lightest, but it has so many missing features!

@Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik
@Hank G ☑️ @Seph Harrison♊ ✅ @Darth Tiktaalik
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
If you want to check our rudimentary roadmap to see what I’m planning and current state of things as of the latest published beta build. Ping here, Issue tracker, or Matrix room listed on the main readme if want to join conversation on features https://gitlab.com/mysocialportal/relatica/-/blob/main/beta-program.md
Cătă
Cătă  
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@Hank G ☑️ Can I suggest features? :D
@Seph Harrison♊ ✅ @Darth Tiktaalik
@Hank G ☑️ @Seph Harrison♊ ✅ @Darth Tiktaalik
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
Yes absolutely! For a dialog on it best place may be the Matrix group or DMing me here or on Matrix. It you want to do a less interactive way then the GitLab issue tracker would be best.
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
I have done nothing explicit to bridge to XMPP so unless there is one that works against generic public Matrix rooms I don’t think there is a way to access it that way.
Cătă
Cătă  
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@Hank G ☑️ I see. No worries, I joined in. It's my first Matrix room I've ever been to so far :D @Seph Harrison♊ ✅ @Darth Tiktaalik
@Hank G ☑️ @Seph Harrison♊ ✅ @Darth Tiktaalik
Seph Harrison♊ ✅
Seph Harrison♊ ✅  
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@Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik @Cătălin Petrescu I've downloaded it to try it out. Looks nice, though I hope you'll add more timelines to it, I usually use Network>Latest Posts as my home, where you have it set to Network>Latest Activity
Outside of that, I like what I see, but it'll be a while before I get to trying it out as I usually don't hit Friendica from my tablet.
@Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik @Cătă
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
Yes I’m hoping to have more than a posts level view of things. I am limited to the type of timelines that we alias into the Mastodon endpoints that ones for the time being. There is always adding extensions to the API Of course.
Seph Harrison♊ ✅
Seph Harrison♊ ✅  
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@Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik @Cătălin Petrescu Don't understand that, but Ok. Yeah, once I check the road map, I'll start reporting problems over on the beta, I have noticed that notifications don't work right, but I might be able to fix that in settings.
@Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik @Cătă
Seph Harrison♊ ✅
Seph Harrison♊ ✅  
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@Cătălin Petrescu @Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik One reason I hated it and Friendiqa is you couldn't get consistent results when sharing links from the browser, sometimes it wouldn't work at all, and usually you'd just get a link, no summary, thumbnail or anything else. Oh, and it was reliable for updating my timeline and alerts.
@Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik @Cătă
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
I didn’t have adding opengraph previews to links in my feature list and I’m not sure how the endpoint we use for posting will handle it if I tried. The fact my usual open and close “sarcasm” tags got stripped on one post I’m
afraid it won’t pass the HTML sterilizers that prevent malicious code from being injected into a post. Worth trying though.
Seph Harrison♊ ✅
Seph Harrison♊ ✅  
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@Darth Tiktaalik @Hank G ☑️ Much the same with @Tusky , it forces Friendica into a Mastodon interface, which is about as bad as you can imagine, though at least it lets me get alerts.
@Hank G ☑️ @Darth Tiktaalik @Tusky
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
My same experience with the Mastodon apps. I want Friendica’s more Facebook like UX, image galleries, real DMs etc. Hence I decided to write one that would work for me and the platforms I use :)
eatliftcode
eatliftcode  
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happy to be an Apple (iPhone/iPad/osx) tester for you! I promise my bug reports will be vague and lacking any context (kidding!)
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
“It crashed” was one of the example of bad feedback I put in the beta notes lol. I should probably put why the various examples are bad though now that I look at it.

Be happy to have you as a tester. The Mac build and all non-iOS platforms are available for direct download now. For iOS it has to go through TestFlight so just DM me you email address and first/last name (or first name and the preferred Friendica account handle). I’m still waiting for app approval from Apple though.

PS sorry if you already DMd me. The Friendica Message systems is one of the big features I need to implement still in the app (which I’m using to write this).
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
oh and all that info is in the README at the repo link and/or other pages that have links on the README page.
mc
mc  
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I finally peeped the code, more out of curiosity than out of knowledge - because I know little about Dart and nothing about flutter -, and it looks good. :)
What can I say? Congratulations.
Expert Plus 🍀
Expert Plus 🍀  
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I would like to get an AppImage version of that app.
Hank G ☑️
Hank G ☑️  
Distribution for Linux via AppImage and/or Flatpak/snap store is something I'd like to do further down the line for sure. Supposedly Flutter supports that sort of distribution model but there are a bunch of steps for setting it up.
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