I designed a Material You app for Lemmy

a_m@lemmy.ml to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 397 points –

Hi everybody, I'm a UI/UX designer and I wanna contribute to the community here with my expertise. Here is a quick prototype for a Android Lemmy app with Material You Design, it's a simple and customizable app. With this app, I also want to improve the experience when exploring different servers.

Obviously, this is just a concept, so if any developer interest, I'm very willing to collaborate with 🫡 . Vice versa, if anyone stucks with designing his/her own Lemmy client, just reach out to me and I will give you a hand.

Here is a quick demo of some basic features: https://vimeo.com/843481714?share=copy

And here is the figma file if you wanna take a look: https://www.figma.com/file/ZBR30l0ZcKuyKMPjeDmvdF/Lemmy-Android-app?type=design&node-id=53526-31054&mode=dev

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Personally prefer to read the title before the image. It's one of the reasons I don't use the Connect app

The connect app now has that as a setting, if that makes a difference for you.

Noted. I was also considering where should I put the title as well. This is just a quick prototype to find out whether any dev is interested in collaboration, so just take it with a grain of salt 😉

top would be preferable.

often the title is needed in order to understand the picture - or the picture is the "punchline" to a joke set up by the text.

I'm using Connect and your can meme the title be before the image in the settings, that's what I did

Thanks, must be a recent update. I'll check it out!

I've mostly committed to Connect, and can confirm there's an option near the bottom to select where to put the title in relation to the picture.

This is something that has been disturbing me with Thunder app, Connect in their latest versions added a switch for this!

Me too. That's what keeps me on jerboa for now.

I switched to Liftoff. I was on Jerboa for the last few weeks as I figured things out, but liftoff is much smoother and has yet to give me an error code

Great work, but super clickbait title.

lol, my bad, I used to be a content writer so it kinda runs in my blood =))) anw, updated for more accurate title

This looks really great! If you're interested in contributing to an app you should check out Liftoff!

We're totally open source and community contribution driven and we're moving fast! But we're lacking designer contributions!

If you're interested check out our open GitHub issues/enhancements:

https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/issues

Got that, I'm checking Matrix so we could have a chat

I just discovered liftoff last night on the Playstore. Finally really getting into Lemmy now that I have a good app to use.

The apps are certainly in need of all the help they can get. I have Lemur and Jerboa, and they're both janky as all heck.

Liftoff is perfect.

Liftoff is pretty great. Devs keep making improvement every day.

I am still waiting for Sync for Lemmy to come out, but Liftoff might convert me.

Does liftoff look different on Android? I feel like it’s ugly as sin on iOS.

I think it looks fine on android, but it probably doesn't integrate with iOS nicely. I also think light themes are bad by default so I can't judge your photo accurately lol.

Here is iOS dark / compact

IMHO, the shadows, padding around cards, corner radiuses, drop down stylings, etc. are all pretty rough. It doesn’t feel as refined as Material You or iOS’s design system.

After driving in Memmy, Mlem, and Wefwef (now Voyager), Liftoff feels kind of janky to me.

Just my 2¢

If you go into settings and turn off card shadows and rounded corners it gets a bit better IMO

Oh god, that’s way better. That stuff should be off by default. That said, I still feel like they need a UI person to contribute, and OP should hit them up.

As someone who does UI for a living, it feels rough to me. I wish I had the time to help out, but I’ve already got a couple other nasty side projects on my plate.

Just popping in to mention the UI got a pretty big update recently. You might want to take another look, I think its a lot better now.

The card shadows are a little much. I forgot those were on my default. @mykl@lemmy.world would you agree?

I don't use compact so I've not seen those before, but I'm sure that's not what anyone intended!

I'd be interested to see what's in the video. I think we're at a good point to spend some time understanding what works on both main target platforms and making the changes to get us there.

Pretty sure that’s just how Android looks.

Liftoff is better but compared to the greats that existed in the reddit ecosystem these are very crude. The platform just needs time for devs to catch up to the 10+ years they had invested in Reddit development. The dev behind sync for Reddit has been hard at work on an client for Lemmy with as much feature parity as possible.

You misspelled "Connect"

(They're both pretty good actually)

Thunder and Connect are better than Jerboa, haven't tried Lemur

Using thunder now. It's not perfect, but it's the best experience for me that I've found so far.

I'm really enjoying wefwef. It's smooth and works well. No weirdness or issues on my end.

I'm currently using connect for lemmy. It works fine, but I still have to use the web version to jumping between servers, which is why I come up with this idea.

Hmm, connect let's me switch between accounts on different instances just fine.

yeah, I'm just too lazy to create account for every servers I find interesting, especially when the different between them are minor

Why would you create an account on every server? You can access any community on any server that your server is federated with.

Wow that front page looks like sync 😁

lol, I use basic components from material library so it should be familiar :)))

"Video is not rated. Log in to watch"

Nope.

I'm putting the final touches on an app using material design. I've broken away from cards and haven't even considered a light mode yet, but I've been pretty unhappy with the search/explorer

This just got me unstuck on it, so thanks

I don't know why, but this exchange felt of fucking romantic. Keep up the good work you amazing people!

Awesome, glad I can help. I also have some design outside of the cards, you can check it out in the Figma link for more inspiration

I think Liftoff would benefit for a Material You UI.

Same. One of the reasons I don't use it. I think a reason they don't priotise is because it supports both android and iOS. Not all users would see it.

Yeah I get it, although Thunder is available for both platforms as well, and Material You looks awesome.

Only reason I'm not using it

I'm a fullstack dev building my own app for Lemmy. I'd be interested in opening a dialogue if you're interested. UI/UX is my weak point :P

Awesome, I just sent u a message

Just like wefwef is nice for iOS, this seems nice for android

Wefwef works great on Android. Supposedly it looks like Apollo, but so what?

It very much looks like an iphone app. All the text and the ui elements fit apples theming and looks out of place in android.

Not to say it doesn't work well or isnt a good app, because it is, but a lot of us are looking for a unified experience.

I'm using thunder, which fits in nicely. Uses Material You theming as well

It works well even on my linux desktop. But in terms of design fits best into iOS

Keeping a native OS UI design language for an app is very nice. Apollo was a great example of this!

I'd love to see Android's version of the same thing.

This is beautiful, and a perfect example post you used there. I know it’s not a release but it makes me wish I had an Android phone to test it anyway lol

Looking very good. I’m on iOS, but I would definitely use an app that look as good as that, as long as it performed good as well.

Congratulations and keep up the good work.

This reminds me a bit of Sync, formally for Reddit. They're bringing it to Lemmy at some point in the future. Love all the new apps coming out for here, great work :)

I like the look. One thing I would like to see is integration of the community search tool to make discoverability easier. Something that shows what server each community is on but also will allow you to search across servers in case you don't know where things are, and a way to view the list of all communities if you want.

hey this looks really similar to a proposal that was made on github for jerboa. Jerboa is also really focused on material UI so maybe it would be best to combine efforts and help each other out.

Hi there, thanks for this. Could you rate the video? It's asking me to logon without a rating.

Fixed, could you check again

Yes that’s great. I looked at the Figma file but seeing stuff moving around on a screen is very powerful. I think this looks like a huge improvement and it tones down a few of the stronger elements making it pass better as an iOS app. Have you worked in iOS at all?

Stu has already put a mock-up of some of these ideas in place and it’s looking very exciting!

Wow! Nice one. I think if we all keep contributing Lemmy will be like VLC. Let's do it !!