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Does Quokkau have any alternative web front-ends? (self.meta)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/meta
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I love some of the features Piefed has, and like not tacitly supporting tankies, but I absolutely cannot stand Piefed's web UI. The inbox is almost impossible to work with, and there's something just a little awkward about basic post comment pages.

So first, have people made good alternative front-ends for Piefed? And if so, does Quokkau have support for any of them?

Bonus question: any recommendations for an Android app? I've been using Summit, but it has a pretty awful user interface in almost an identical way to the biggest problems with the Piefed web.

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[–] [S] 1 point 8 months ago (4 children)

Hey, I'm playing around with Blorp and I think I like it a lot more than the default Piefed interface. But it does have some pretty glaring issues. And some more minor ones.

  • It has infinite scroll, which I love, but it seems to de-load things that are out of the viewport. To me, this completely defeats one of the primary ways I use infinite scroll, which is when I know something should be somewhere, but don't know where, I load up a huge amount of stuff and ctrl-f.
  • Loading in extra comments inline doesn't seem to be possible, only in a new page.
  • Search is just straight-up not working. I've been trying to find this post in Blorp, but can't do it. I can't find a way to use that exact URL. I can't search for the title, it just gives back "Nothing to see here" (despite the header saying "Posts [1] Comments [2]"). I can't load up !australia@aussie.zone or my profile and scroll back a way and ctrl-f because of the aforementioned issue.
  • Turning on markdown mode makes the text editor look aggressively unpleasant. I understand the intent—make it visually distinct from the rich text editor—but as someone who vastly prefers editing in markdown, being forced to look at that font when typing would not be a pleasant experience.

Tagging @Quokka@quokk.au in case she's interested.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    Looping back to the last bullet point. It uses a monospace font when editing markdown. My thought process here is: markdown is code, and code is usually edited in monospace fonts, therefore we edit raw markdown in monospace.

    I could load a prettier monospace font, but I’m trying to keep things lean, so I use the built in monospace font.

    I do think it would be cool if all the buttons like bold, italic, etc remained when you were editing raw markdown. So in my opinion, the raw markdown editor could be improved, but the font isn’t the issue. Let me know if you still disagree.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    markdown is code

    Here's where I disagree. Markdown is just text. All its styling is designed to be human-writable and human-readable. As a comparison, classic Reddit doesn't use monospace, neither the default UIs of Lemmy or Piefed use monospace. YouTube, which uses not markdown but its own kinda similar markup language doesn't.

    On the other hand, GitHub's on-site text editor is always monospace, and questions & answers on Stack Exchange are edited using a monospace font.

    I do think there's something about the specific font used on Blorp that makes it worse than SE, which definitely doesn't help. But my overall feeling is that because it's mainly aimed at writing text with a little formatting for spice, a proportional font is more appropriate.

    I've actually been using Blorp as my main UI for the last few days. I love the fact that it's so friendly on mobile. And even remembers where I left off in typing a comment if I close out of typing the comment, for example to go back and read more of the thread's context.

    Some small suggestions: the PWA/installed webapp experience could be better. It doesn't use the app's logo/favicon as an app icon. And it opens in my browser itself, rather than in a separate "app" window (the way that, say, Cinny—the Matrix client web app—does). Though this might actually be to its advantage, since it makes "open in new tab" more convenient...I haven't fully decided yet. I'm also not a fan of the app auto-refreshing if I reopen it after a while.

    An easy way to get back to a specific comment thread would also be nice. In other apps, either clicking on the timestamp or on a specific "permalink" button (e.g. "🔗" or the fediverse logo—though the latter tends to be a permalink to the canonical source, i.e. the comment on the commenter's own instance, rather than an internal link) takes you to a link that keeps that specific comment at the top. I often use it if there's a specific conversation I want to come back to later (e.g., I'm awaiting a reply to a question someone posted which I also share). I'll open the permalink in new tab, then go back to the main feed to browse something else in the meantime.

    Blorp is definitely my preferred way to use Piefed right now, and has contributed a not insignificant amount to my increasing use of this account rather than my Lemmy one. So serious kudos for the great work you've done on it!

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Having other comparables (e.g. Reddit, Lemmy, PieFed, YouTube, etc) is extremely helpful. Thanks for taking the time to research how each of those does it. I’ll take that into consideration.

    PWA could definitely be improved. I’ve just been waiting for the right person to ask.

    If you click the “…” menu on a comment then share, you can copy or share a link that goes directly to the comment you wanna come back to. That might be a good starting point, but let me know if that doesn’t solve the problem for you.

    You are good at giving feedback. Any chance you have experience writing GitHub issues? If you turn your feedback into issues, it’s much easier for them not to get forgotten. If not, I’ll try and triage your comments into GitHub issues.

    https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp

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