Pachli 2.14.0 is now available. This release remembers your reading position in lists, adds a new UI for managing your accounts, and more.
New features and other improvements #
Restore the user’s reading position in lists #
If you follow a lot of people or a lot of topics then lists can be a great way to organise your reading experience.
You can create a list (“Manage lists”, from the left navigation menu), add one or more accounts you follow to that list, and tick the “Hide from the home timeline” checkbox. Posts from those accounts will be hidden on your Home timeline and will only appear on the list.
You can easily add each list to a tab and have a more organised experience.
Previously, while Pachli restored your reading position in the Home and Notifications timelines it did not when viewing a list. So every time you opened the list you’d be placed at the top.
Now Pachli remembers and restores your reading position in each list too, making them more useful and an even better organisational tool.
Provide an “Account Management” UI #
Previously it was possible for an account to become “stuck” in Pachli. For example, if you had an account on a server and that server shut down it was not possible to log out of the account in Pachli. It didn’t do any harm, but it was always present in the account switching options, cluttering up the UI.
This was reported by Ben Cox and others.
Now you can get a quick overview of all your accounts.
- Open the left navigation menu.
- Tap the triangle next to the account name at the top to open the accounts menu.
- Tap the new “Manage accounts” menu item (below “Add account”)
You’ll see a list of all of your accounts, with the currently active account clearly marked.
It also shows the (debugging) data about notification fetches. This information is also currently shown in the “Preferences” screen, and a later Pachli release may remove it from there so it is only present in the “Manage accounts” screen.
You can switch to an account from this list, or log any of the accounts out, which deletes any local data Pachli has about that account.
Speed up account switching if the user has no account filters #
Some of the anti-harassment features that launched earlier this year (e.g., conversation filters) mean Pachli needs to know the accounts you follow.
To do that, whenever you either switch accounts or Pachli relaunches, requests are sent to your server to get the list of accounts you follow.
This would be unnecessary if Mastodon implemented https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/33066.
Typically this takes less than a second and happens while Pachli is displaying the splash screen with the logo.
But if you follow many accounts then Pachli will have to send many requests – Mastodon doesn’t return all the accounts in one go, Pachli has to request them in batches – and that can take many seconds to complete, making Pachli slower to start, or slower when you switch accounts.
In this release Pachli will only wait for this data if you have enabled one of the anti-harassment account filter options, which should speed up account switching for anyone that (a) follows a lot of accounts, and (b) doesn’t use the anti-harassment features.
This change was prompted by feedback from @vinyl@mastodon.nl – at the time of writing they follow 2.1K accounts, so this was a big problem for them.
Updates to translations #
Languages with updated translations are:
- Chinese (Simplified Han script) by HPCesia (their first contributions to Pachli)
- Estonian by Priit Jõerüüt (their first contributions to Pachli)
- Finnish by Kalle Kniivilä
- Indonesian by Doctorredits_here
- Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
- Italian by Dizro (their first contributions to Pachli)
- Latvian by Edgars Andersons
- Norwegian Nynorsk by sunniva
- Polish by Łukasz Horodecki
- Russian by Yurt Page (their first contributions to Pachli)
- Slovak by Russssty
- Tamil by தமிழ்நேரம்
If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.
Significant bug fixes #
Delete cached notifications when deleting server notifications #
If you used the “Delete all notifications” feature Pachli would delete all your notifications from your server but didn’t delete the cached copy. So the next time you checked your notifications in Pachli they would still be shown.
This was reported by Aakerbeere and by DB Schwein, and fixed in #1585.
Don’t crash when receiving severed relationship notifications #
nibbles- reported (#1569) that Pachli would crash if they received a notification after a domain was blocked. This was fixed in #1572.
Don’t crash when cancelling images during activity cancellation #
The image loading library Pachli uses could crash when leaving a Pachli screen. This was fixed in #1562.
Prevent IndexOutOfBoundsException on text long press #
Android versions 8.0 and below will crash if you long-press to select text and then long-press again while the text is selected. Pachli now works around this (#1561).
Thank you #
Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.
Download Pachli 2.14.0 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.