deck.blue v2.13 is up!
Added 2025-05-22 21:53:09 +0000 UTCHey everyone, this is the first update in 2 months and I have a lot to tell you about. This isn't going to be as long as the previous post, but please bear with me for a while.
First things first: what about v3?
Things haven't been looking good on that front, unfortunately. I was way too confident in how much time I would have in these two months and life happened: I had to move because the costs of my previous place were going up by way too much, so I spent all April handling the move. I just moved two weeks ago and finally found time to work on deck.blue again.
As for progress on v3: I was able to port over all authentication related stuff and you're already able to see the same columns as in v2 when logging in, but a lot of stuff is missing. The composer isn't working as it should yet (and I'm working on a version that supports threads, so that's another challenge), there's no column settings working, the notification column also needs stuff to work properly and I made a huge mistake:
4 months is not enough to rebuild deck.blue from scratch while learning a whole new language and framework. I won't be able to deliver it by July as previously stated and I'm very sorry about this. I'm also not really sure if I can provide a deadline again as I'm going way slower than I thought I would be. There's good news though, Flutter updated recently and it was able to fix several of the issues that raised the need for v3 to happen. I'm not stopping development on v3, but these fixes made it a bit less urgent to do so.
Flutter actually fixed stuff
As of today, deck.blue v2 is using Flutter 3.32 and the canvaskit renderer. Here's a few things that are better now:
Better performance;
Better support for selecting text in the editor;
Spellcheck is back in as it works marginally better now, but it's turned off by default. Turn it on in the toggles section in settings;
Font rendering looks sharper now (some people might not like this but it's out of my control, unfortunately);
Emoji selector support for Windows/Linux (previously it only worked on macOS) as well as more emojis finally working instead of showing weird boxes or "de-structured" emoji;
The issue where you would see text taking over other unrelated components (ex: post's text swapping places) is finally fixed;
And you can finally right-click any image to open/copy/save it.
Update 2025-05-23: As of 2.13.0+810, the renderer change has been reverted as it was causing text overlap issues, font issues and images blinking in a way that I couldn't reproduce and to be able to fix.
In this update I've also redesigned the profile window so as to match what I'm doing in v3 and did a minor change in the scheduling setup. You're now also able to see which images have ALT text or not before opening them.
I'll keep updating deck.blue v2 as Flutter also updates, and I decided to add a new paid feature next month: scheduling reposts. Before, this would only launch after v3 but I decided it would be better for me to do this before, test it out and make sure it's already stable by the time I'm adding it to the next version.
Thank you, and
once again, I'm really sorry that I won't able to deliver v3 by July and I'll keep improving v2 in the meantime to make sure you're still getting the best out of Bluesky.