Read Standard.site in Boost Blue

Welcome to Boost Blue's first Leaflet's post! I'm going to start writing release notes here to give me more room to cover new features and the intent behind them than I can get on Bluesky. I've been thinking about doing this for a while, and today's release seemed like an obvious time to jump in. To the main event!

Standard.site integration v2

The main focus of v3.26.0 is the next step in Boost's Standard.site integration. One of my early goals with Boost Blue was to make it a place for more than just Bluesky content, even if that was its main focus. I took an early stab at that with the Statusphere integration, and I'm really excited to be taking the next step with one of the more popular content forms in the Atmosphere.

Articles: Easily keep up with your standard.site subscriptions in app. Articles shows all recent posts from your subscriptions in chronological order.

Reader: Tapping any standard.site article with content will (optionally) open the article in a new reader page within Boost Blue. From there you can easily recommend the article, subscribe to the writer, or open to the original on web.

Writers you follow: From the articles page, the button in the top right will take you to Writers you follow. This is... a list of writers you follow. Any Bluesky user you follow that has a publication with an article will show here. Tap any to open on web, or subscribe right in app.

Standard.site on Profiles: Any Bluesky profile that has a published article now shows an Articles tab and a Publications tab to browse their long form work. Tap any publication to subscribe, or open on web.

A few translations updates

On Tuesday I release v3.25.0 with some changes to translations. I moved from using Google Translate's API to on device models. Since I no longer have to pay Google to translate posts, I removed the 10 translations limit for free users.

To keep Premium, premium, I included a new feature to automatically translate posts as they are shown. This has had some mixed reception.

Firstly, there was no option to disable it. I realized that was a gap after submitting it, but with Apple's current wait times, I didn't want to pull and resubmit it. If I had known how many people would want the option, I probably would have. But good news, it's here in this release. If you don't like the automatic translations, you can disable them from settings.

Additionally, there was a major bug in this release. If you do not have a language installed for on device translation, the intent is to show a small button on a post that needs it, prompting you to install that language. I broke this towards the end of my testing fixing another bug. Unfortunately, because I'd been testing for a week, I already had all of the languages installed, and never saw this issue. It's fixed now, my apologies!

Catching up to Bluesky

Bluesky finally released a "Hide reposts" feature on a per user basis. This has been a premium feature in Boost Blue since our paid plan launched. My approach on premium features has been to only charge for additional functionality beyond what Bluesky provides, so as of this release this is no longer limited to Premium users. I've also renamed the feature "Hide reposts", and migrated any existing mutes to Bluesky's new system, so they should work between Boost Blue and Bluesky.

Small addendum: I've also added the "Followed via starter pack" notification type on the notifications page.

Feedback and bugs

Last week I posted asking what bugs had led users to stop using Boost Blue, or that were annoying as current users. I got a lot of great feedback, and have been working through those issues. I started working through that list, but most of those issues are still outstanding as of this update.

Fixed so far:

iPad edit popup sizing adjusts dynamically

Removed incorrect content filters

Disabled replies label on the post detail page shows correct text

Limits quote posts when the author has disabled them

Added threaded posts UI to the Profile page

Enabled refreshing search results

Limiting some Post Page buttons to prevent overflow with larger texts

Thanks for reading! I'm excited to have a place to go into more detail for future changes to Boost Blue. You can download the app here, and as always, if you have any feedback or additional feature requests please let me know on Bluesky!