nikclayton

Under the hood we're updating the Tusky design to make the code easier to work with and reason about, particularly with how timelines are handled.

A timeline is any list of posts. What you see on the Home tab is a timeline, so is the Notifications tab, Local, Federated, search results, trending tags, all of it.

This is a big task, and trying to do it to all timelines at once would be very difficult. So the work is broken up to focus on one or more timelines at a time. This also means that if there's anything that turns out to be a bad idea we can fix it on the affected timeline before it affects everything.

The timeline on the Notifications tab is the first one to get these changes.

So what's changed?

Missing posts

There have been occasional reports about posts missing from timelines (https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/3505, https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/3320).

This is fixed with the re-write. As I say, initially for Notifications, but on all timelines in the next major release.

No more “Load more”

The “Load more” list entry you might see as you scroll through your notifications? That's gone. Notifications now load automatically as you scroll through the list.

You can jump to the top of the loaded list by tapping the icon in the tab header (that's not new in this release). v22.1 will add a menu item to jump to the most recent notifications, even if they haven't been loaded yet.

Remembering the reading position

Your “reading position” is remembered. If you leave the tab and come back (even if you fully exit the app) you'll be restored back to the notification you were last reading.

If that notification no longer exists (maybe you dismissed it, or changed your filters so it's no longer visible) then Tusky tries to put you as close as possible to that position.

Better error handling

Your server might not be available. Maybe it's down for maintenance, or your phone doesn't have Internet connectivity. Tusky now handles this more gracefully, with better options to recover.

If you're scrolling through notifications and the next set fail to load the current set remain, and you'll see (a) more detail about the error, and (b) an option to retry. The error details are important, as they give you a better idea of what the problem is and how you might fix it.

If you interact with a post in the notifications tab (boost, favourite, bookmark, etc) and that fails you'll also be told why, with a “Retry” option.

Previously those failures could be invisible, and lead to user feedback like “I bookmarked this post, the icon changed, but it's not in my bookmarks”. That could happen because the “bookmark this post” request was sent to the server but the server didn't receive it. Tusky optimistically updated the UI to show the bookmark had succeeded, but didn't update the UI when it failed.

This was me, in https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/pull/3159.