Zing: A (beta) ILX client for Macs

whaaaaaaat

is that a desktop client?

YESSS

holy cow! might finally be time to switch my work PC to a mac. :)

i’m not sure how i feel about this

Me too. I spent ages wondering if it was worth it now that browsers are so good and fast. But I got tired of testing Zing Touch in the simulator so then I made this as a wrapper ... and then I found I was using it nearly exclusively.

Need to add search but it's pretty usable. I'll put up a beta if people would like a play.

yes, please!

I'm in.

OK, here goes!

It's definitely a beta but it's OK to use for checking bookmarks and posting.

Notes:
- Search isn't implemented yet
- Nor are themes (but dark mode works)
- Can't favourite borads
- Can't cmd-c on selected message text, you have to right-click
- Single-pane mode (close the message list from X) is a little buggy.
- The menubar checker drags off but doesn't resize.

Download here:
https://www.ilxor.com/MacZing.zip

(Oh also: drag it out of the Downloads folder before opening it for best results)

downloading now - thanks stet. zing is genuinely one of the best apps on my phone, so looking forward to giving this a go.

and posting from it now : )

Stet is the man

Trying this now. thanks. Right now all my bookmarks are duplicated. Two lines for every one (to the tune of "Surf City").

oooh that's weird. Can you check you don't accidentally have two accounts listed? (In preferences go to the accounts tab)

Same account listed twice, yes.

I deleted one at which point it logged me off. I logged back on. Now it shows no accounts.

well done me - if you trying adding once more it should hopefully work

Now it's there twice again.

But this time I deleted the first and not the second and now I'm back down to one.

Trying this now -- works very nicely from here!

Works pretty good for me. ILX links in posts open in my browser though.

Yes, this later was kind of shocking, tbh, although I suppose it makes sense.

i don't prefer it to the website (and i think it's a little slower) but still v cool

Works fine, but I'll have to stay with the browser until I can enlarge type in zing.

It’s obvious how much Apple has neglected the Mac when you start coding for it again. Like on iPhone I can really easily set everything to the user’s preferred text size. There’s no support for that on Mac at all.

Changing the link behaviour is really easy, I’ll do that.

So cool. Couple things:
- I can drag to change the width of the threads list, but as soon as I let go it snaps back
- It'd be nice if arrows/PgDn/PgUp worked to scroll

posted from MacZing

thanks! got the width bug. The page up/dn thing is harder - it's the same bug as copy/paste note working. will take a look over the weekend

oh maybe that's what you meant by menubar checker

haven't tried writing a Mac desktop app but it doesn't surprise me they've let the frameworks stagnate.

Now I have five copies of each bookmark. Only one account listed in Preferences.

What version of macOS are you running? It seems like this might be linked to how the keychain stores passwords

Mojave, sorry.

It actually went up to six for a while. Just logged off and back on again

Maybe it has to do with logging onto the browser at the same time?

grasp✧✧✧@str✧✧✧.c✧✧

Lol. That was supposed to be grasping at straws dot com.

Are you running from the Downloads folder?

The problem (I think) is that it is trying to save your settings and somehow failing and repeatedly trying. Quarantine might conceivably cause that; and moving it out of the Download folder will remove quarantine from it.

(You might also need to erase ~/Library/Containers/com.haunteddancehall.maczing (or similar) before trying again. Sorry! Beta 4 lyfe

Yeah, I might be doing something like that, thanks.

Might be nice to see the current thread with some kind of subtle highlight in the threads list.

This is how I read ILX now. Shut up and take my money, etc.

I'd been wondering whether to bother doing more work on it, so that's good to hear! I'm getting quite into using it in one-pane mode (cmd-1, cmd-2) in a small window over to the side — it sits nicely beside Tweetdeck.

i'm not sure it *really* has enough over the browser functionality, then again, i'm using it now. Ctrl+D for bookmarking open threads is *incredibly* useful (would be useful to have a shortcut to unbookmark as well). Second lukas's request for some sort of shading in the open thread when using it in 2-pane mode. i can see if it had a bit more functionality it could easily become my default on mac.

actually i was just thinking how nice it would be to have full reader/email shortcut functionality - p/n for going up and down between messages, j/k for going up and down between bookmarks/threads. r for replying to a particular message in focus, automatically taking the message body and putting it in quote or italic bbcode brackets etc. so consider me interested!

and actually *is* there a way to remove a bookmark from a thread?

and filtering bookmarks according to boards. sorry i'm getting carried away now - i know this is a spare time thing. on a basic using it point - it would be nice if clicking on a thread took you to the most recent post, or the most recently read post – i can't quite understand the existing behaviour about which post it goes to when you click on a thread.

no, keep this coming, I love it! The only way to remove a bookmark right now is to right-click (or ctrl-click) on the bookmark itself and choose "remove".

Board-level bookmarks is a great idea, too.

The thread behaviour isn't right, no. The way it works right now is that if you click a bookmark you see the thread starting from your last bookmark, if you choose a thread from new answers you get shown the 50 oldest and 50 most recent posts, with a fold in the middle. What it should really do is know if you've opened a thread before and if so take you to the most recent posts.

ah right, interesting, thanks stet, and thanks on the remove bookmark instructions. also, i *think* if you have something that looks like bbcode that's incorrectly closed out, it will just go NOPE, rather than allowing a 'post anyway?' option. tbf my bracketing so often does require checking and revising you could argue this is *no bad thing*.

using now, seems great. will update if i run into any trouble. thanks for working on this :)

using MacZing for the first time right now! boldly, in italics, underlining...

formatting: CHECK

having a great time! i'm also going to throw some ideas out as i go - take with a grain of salt, of course.

Is there a way to increase the size of the text submission area? i see that if i keep typing, it starts to add extra space, but it would be great if it could be manually resized by dragging the edge of the pane.

(by the way, for people who haven't checked this out - one really cool quality of life thing is that you can scroll through the rest of the thread while keeping the message submission box on the screen. will be very handy for composing ridiculous messages in threads where people are rite and rong all over the place