Android Alpha 7 (Lagrange v1.12 Preview)

Improving my development environment seemed to help, because here I now am posting the first preview of Lagrange v1.12 as an Android build.

F-Droid Repo

Download the APK directly

Compared to iOS betas, which go through TestFlight and have 0-24 hours of delay for some sort of review by Apple, I can just post APKs whenever I want. Yay for sideloading?

The Alpha phase still continues as I haven’t added any new Android-specific features. For v1.12 I am still planning to add an export/import feature, though, and that will require a file picker on mobile platforms. Perhaps that will be the first Beta feature — we shall see.

A peek at v1.12

iPhone running v1.12 with the Roboto font, justified paragraphs, and bottom URL field (PNG, 94 KB)

I ended up doing a bunch of visual changes for v1.12, many of which have been on my mind for a longer time:

The default font for everything is now Roboto for all platforms except Microsoft Windows. This is a closer match with many system fonts, so not only does it look more modern but it's also a step toward the goal of using system fonts as default. The old Source Sans remains as an option.

There is an option to justify "long" paragraphs. While it's aesthetically very pleasing to not have ragged edges, it undoubtedly comes at the cost of some readability. In practice, the "ragged" space is distributed between words, and also between individual glyphs in the extreme cases. Alas, hyphenation is not available as that would reduce the need to modify the spaces so much.

Prodded by @gnuserland on Station, I went ahead and added options to move the URL field and/or tab bar to the bottom of the screen/window on all platforms. This is particularly nice on mobile, as it brings all the important UI elements near the thumb.

There is a new page content theme called "Oceanic". It uses a color palette that's restricted to blue, teal, orange, and red, but still varies in brightness and saturation depending on the site. One could describe it as a more reserved version of Colorful Dark/Light that focuses on blue colors. It also adapts to both dark and light UI modes.

Colorful Dark/Light and Sepia have been refined a bit. Sepia in particular was tuned rather a lot, and now also has a dark mode variant.

The plan for the export/import of user data is to simply save bookmarks and identities into a ZIP archive, and enable importing items from an exported ZIP. I'll try to keep it simple.

📅 2022-03-19

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