After some internal drama back in December, I’ve finally decided to resume development of Tesseract. It is currently targeting the upcoming Sublinks project as well as Lemmy.

That said, the project never fully died. I still run the latest release version as the default UI on my instance, and I’ve pushed bugfixes on the last release. I’ve also made sure 0.19.x support was working. Other than that, though, not much was done until recently.

1.3.0 is in Development

I’m excited about this release. I won’t put the full change log here and will only stick to the highlights:

  • Lots of polish has been added throughout the application already, but there’s still more to go.
  • Reduced memory consumption by…a LOT. Media embeds now only render when they’re in the viewport and revert to thumbnails when not. I opted for this automatic behavior rather than “click to play”.
  • The whole UI has been updated to take advantage of context-sensitive menus in the navigation bar
  • Searching has had a major face / feature lift.
  • Modlog filtering has had a similar retrofit (have a few new features to add there, just still “to do” status on them).
  • Now supports PeerTube embeds (you can already follow Peertube channels in Lemmy; now the videos will embed as well!)
  • New notification widget
  • Infinite scroll
  • Loading spinner before Svelte content is rendered (no more black screen on cold loads)
  • LOTS of bugfixes and a11y fixes (and other fixes to make Typescript shut up)
  • Reimplemented dropdown menus to work better on mobile as well as be more visually appealing

Progress

I’d estimate this release is about 60% complete. There’s no firm release date set, but I’m estimating within the next 3-4 weeks.

Nightly Builds

If you’re brave and want to run a preview version, you can do so in one of the following ways:

  • Clone and build from the 1.3.0 branch
  • Run the nightly Docker image (currently only built for amd64 since I don’t have an ARM build environment)
    • ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.3.0-nightly

I daily drive the nightly builds on my dev instance, so they’re fairly stable. I don’t commit to the 1.3.0 branch or push an update to the 1.3.0-nightly tag if anything is broken. That said, some feature re-implementations may be partially incomplete as I do push stable checkpoints.

Get Updates

I’ve setup a Matrix space for support, discussion, and feature ideas.