As mentioned in another post, I've moved here from Arctic since it stopped development, and there are just a couple of things I miss. Overall of course mlem is much better, if nothing else than by dint of ongoing development, and it would be fab to see little UX improvements here and there, so this is my stab at documenting the ones that niggle me the most. Others may disagree, and that's fine; this is, in the words of the great one, just my opinion man.
Opening an image on Arctic was just about the best user experience I'd had since Apollo. Here are the main differences I see:
- Open image without the overlay—no distractions, or buttons covering up bits of the meme text. It's far more common to just want to see the image than to share, copy, save, etc.
- Double-tap and drag to zoom—probably the biggest one for me. This is so much better for one-handed operation on a smaller device. The double tap zoom is too extreme in most cases.
- Single tap when zoomed to reset zoom—again, much quicker to reset / close an image, and more likely than needing the overlay. Dismissing a zoomed image in Arctic was basically 'tap, swipe', and very slick.
- Reduce drag distance to dismiss—this is perhaps just a preference, but I'd like to reduce that to almost zero, so that the tiniest flick of a finger would dismiss a 'non-zoomed' image.
- Improve rotation handling—this is hard to describe, but open an image, zoom in / out, then rotate the device. The zoom is now weirdly offset, and it's easy to even lose an image off-screen.
I'd also love the option to permanently hide the zoom factor popup—again, just distraction and I'd rather not see it, but appreciate others may like that, so definitely some of the above should be options: show overlay at start, show zoom factor, dismiss sensitivity, etc.
I'd highly recommend trying out Arctic just for this one thing; there's plenty else it doesn't do as well, but I feel images were a strong point. You could even open a compact feed view thumbnail as an image, rather than opening the link which was sometimes useful.