cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25135715
alexandrite.app - !alexandrite@lemmy.world - Github
Hey, got some new updates for ya!
I added instance blocking, and completely redesigned the page for managing blocks. For all three categories you're able to search, so you don't have to go to someone's profile or find a post by them to find a block button to click. Honestly this page looked awful before, the sizing was weird, if you blocked something with a long name the 'unblock' buttons would be huge. I mostly copied the features available on lemmy-ui (like the searching, and the fact that instance blocks are a thing now).
Tooltips in a couple places got some big upgrades!
User tooltips now show the full 'address' of the user (which it did before, but it wasn't super obvious what you were looking at), and you can now see when they made their account.
Community tooltips got the same address/origin date.
When you hover over a crosspost link it additionally shows the crosspost's title, who posted, when, the score, and comment counts. This should make it a lot easier to see where other discussion is actually happening.
The card layout has a new feature, a nice frosted glass background. This looks similar to how Photon renders its link previews. If you're not familiar with it, this is what I'm talking about.. The effect is fairly subtle because it stretches over the entire card and it could be distracting, I wanted to make sure a fully white image wouldn't make the text too hard to read.
It's on by default, but you can turn it off with the "Frosted glass background" checkbox in Alexandrite settings when your Feed Post Layout is set to Cards if you'd like. If you're curious how it's done, it loads a low resolution thumbnail, places it with a low opacity behind the card, and blurs it so it's less distracting and hides how pixelated it is. It works because all the gray background colors on the site (like all the gray backgrounds on cards) are transparent so when stacked on other gray backgrounds there's always a contrast in color without any extra work. If you don't want to load extra images just for this, or if the blur makes the site lag on a low spec device (didn't notice any impact on my pc), then you might want to turn this setting off.
Besides that, I bumped the node version the docker image uses, and I think that's about it.
Let me know if there's any features Alexandrite is missing that you'd really like! Especially interested in features you want that the default Lemmy UI has that I haven't added yet (like instance blocks until now, community creation/editing, emojis, user/community search when typing a @ or ! in the markdown editor, etc).
