Apps are always nice, but lots of mobile websites, including the kbin one, are entirely functional as an app. In your browser you can just make a shortcut to them, and they’ll appear on your home screen and act as an app.
In technical terms these are Progressive Web Apps, but it means you don’t need to wait for someone to write an app (or kbin to have a good API for doing so) to use it like an app on your phone.
In Firefox it looks like this. Open the website, in the menu hit Install, drag the icon to your desktop. When you click on it it’ll open the site like it’s a standalone app.
Chrome is exactly the same, but the menu button is “Install App” instead.
One thing I wish both the desktop and mobile app had was the ability to collapse comment threads. It’s handy to just be able to quickly click to collapse a thread at the highest level and move on to the next one. Jerboa has that function for Lemmy, but for some unknown reason they don’t allow the user to change comment sorting (eg. top comments). It just forces chronological comment sorting.
Man I wish Relay was available for either Kbin or Lemmy… sigh
Ask and you shall receive…at least for desktop: https://kbin.social/m/kbinStyles/t/50628/Improved-Collapsible-Comments-Script-that-lets-you-collapse-replies-by
You will need to install tampermonkey/firemonkey on your browser though
@PurpleReign As far as I read that is already in development and should come soon.
one thing is the PWA doesn’t respect screen rotation lock for some reason
The reason is that the web manifest has an unnecessary orientation property. A very easy fix. Please go thumbs up this issue and the fix PR so maybe Earnest notices it and we can get back to bedtime threadsurfing sooner 🌝
Yeah, but…
-
can’t edit the url/no great way I can see to intentionally go to a specific place on another instance
-
ignores rotation lock
-
can’t cancel writing a comment
-
(right now) keeps forcing what I’m typing into a reply to user Scio instead of its own comment like I’m trying so…we’ll see.
-
Sometimes I end up either not knowing where I am or in places/menus that are unintuitive to get out of.
-
no collapsing comments w/o script which I haven’t looked into how to do yet.
And plenty of other things
Edit:yeah it did put me under Scio.
It’s fine, but not great. It works in a pinch, but it doesn’t feel nearly as smooth/integrated as a native app.
I just dont like how you can’t tell what magazine you’re looking at while on mobile.
You can, you just have to scroll to the bottom of all the comments.
My apologies, I don’t know if you never saw it, there, or if you saw it there and just didn’t like it.
does anyone know why I didn’t get a notification for this reply? I have the boxes checked off that should allow me to see them.
