Experiment 08 – New Compact Magazine View Option

Listening to the murmurs in the Lab Slack channel, it seems that controlling the density of the articles is important to the community. Some users like to see a mix of images with the article summary, some people prefer to see only text, some people want more density, some less. In Experiment 08, we took that feedback into account and added a new density preference which can be applied to text only, magazine, and card views. The result is more control over how you want to consume your feeds.

Note: The view and density settings can be configured for each source, feed, or board. There is also a global option in the app settings.

New icons

As part of Experiment 08, we are pushing out the new set of icons (designed by the talented Daniel Klopper)

Polish and bug fixes

The team also took advantage of the Experiment 08 build to fix the following bugs and rough edges:

• Added button to go from no unread to all articles (Thank you Daron, John, Rogerio)
• Return to feed list after swiping the last/first article (Thank you Peter & Scott)
• We added support for Firefox and Chrome as favorite browsers on iOS (Thank you Donhack, Peter, Jon)
• We fixed an authentication error related to trying to login to Google in a webview (Thank you P and Anks)
• We fixed the iPad framing bug at first launch (Thank you Michal)
• We fixed the image loading issue where sometimes the preview would show an image but not the opened article (Thank you Mark)
• We fixed the long titles in header bug (Thank you Chip)
• We improved the Youtube integration (Thank you Seb)
• After refresh at the end of the Today page, we are not staying on the Today page (Thank you Paavo)
• We added an option to open a source from an inlined article by tapping on the source name (Thank you Xeor)
• Separated auto-mark as read between mobile and Web. You will have to re-select auto-mark as read on scroll in the mobile settings if you want to activate it.
• Improved discover search auto-completion history experience (Thank you Jesse)
• We polished the back mode of the paged scrolling option (Thank you #paged-scrolling)
• We fixed the conflict between the text selection and the close gestures
• Refreshing the All page after mark as read in the All page footer (Thank you Dallas)
• Fixed rename source bug (Thank you Dallas)
• Make discover language sticky (Thank you Eduardo)

Next: Switching the Classic App and the Lab App

The next two weeks are about fixing bugs and rough edges and getting to the point where we can replace the classic app with the new lab app. Your feedback is going to be extremely useful during that time. Once you have 48.0.2 installed, if you experience any bug or run into a part of the experience which does not feel polished, please add a message to the #bugs Slack channel. The dev team will be actively monitoring that channel and try to fix as many bugs and rough edges as possible.