Micro Social

The incoming v1.6.5 version of Micro Social contains a lot of UI improvements and a few new features to keep you posting to the community. The biggest of which is the ability to add locations to your posts.

You’d be forgiven for even knowing micro.blog supports location ‘check ins’ but it’s something that many people enjoy posting. The issue before was the difficulty of doing so without a complicated set-up – Micro Social smooths this out using Apple Maps.

By tapping the three dots when writing a new post, you can choose to add a location. The app offers a search to help you find the location using the Apple Maps lookup, and you can use your location to narrow down the search if you wish.

Privacy: At no point does the app collect any data on you including location. This uses on device locations, and all of this data is controlled by Apple Maps on your device. You can decide to send the co-ordinates of this, the URL of the location or no data at all, with your blog post.

This will add the location name and a pin at the start of your post. Micro Social also notices these pins in your timeline and makes the post cleaner to see and easier to interact with. All on device so your privacy is protected.

Long Press

You can now long press the FAB when active to quickly check in at a location or post a photo without going into the new post and adding extra info.

If you like to check out these new features download Micro Social today.

In an effort to provide absolutely everything I want for a social-focused micro.blog app, I have been thinking about ‘reblogging’ posts. This is relatively easy to implement but requires a lot of thought so it doesn’t ruin users’ experience — hence my desire to seek feedback.

My current state is as follows. A user of Micro Social will be able to share the post to external apps or select reblog to be able to share their thoughts on it. This is a typical retweet or boost with a comment on Mastodon. Unfortunately, on social media, it is often used as associated with ‘dunking’ on others.

As this is typically the case, I have thought long and hard about how this will be done. I typically do this quite a bit for blog posts using Jarrod’s excellent Shortcut, and my aim is for this to cut down on the need for external apps.

When a user taps reblog, they will be greeted with a screen that does not allow them to edit or remove the link, and also text urging them not to change too much about the quote. I considered not allowing editing at all; however, this often resulted in posts being too long, so I settled on this. However, I am happy to receive feedback on this.

You can then leave your comments below and share the post as you would any other.

These will all appear in the same format to allow them to easily be consumed no matter where you see the new posts. I aim to improve this further with styling unique to Micro Social, but make this optional and not affect viewing them in other places. What I really don’t want is to make the experience different for users of different apps.

Feedback Required

My overall aim is to make something useful for the micro.blog community and I’d love feedback on this. This enables me to gauge the feelings around this feature to ensure the community builds this with me and dictates where things go. Features such as this that make an a large impact on the community may not launch as a result of feedback.

Feel free to reply to this post or email me using the link in Micro Social.

The last few weeks have been slow and steady work on Micro Social in between the other commitments I have. As the app is now fairly well rounded the concentration turns to bug fixes and adding larger features. The latest version features quite a few of both!

Share Sheet

There’s now a custom Share Sheet that accepts photos, images, text and Safari webpages. Meaning you can share a wide range of things to Micro Social and post without even opening the app. More information can be found here.

Link Posts

To go with the Share sheet, you can customise how links posts appear in your posts when you share Safari webpages to it. Head in to settings and use the markup to format them how you wish. More information here.

URL Scheme

Expanding the deep linking URL scheme outside of quick actions and into new post creation and also adding books to book shelves. With 1.6 you can create a new post or add an ISBN to any of your new shelves with ease, more information here.

Blog Settings

There are several UI and UX updates around blog settings and blog posts. Switching between blogs, is now done by tapping your profile at the top, and if you are a Micro Social Plus supporter you can also edit posts from here.

Coupled with this you can now add categories, show the title for blog posts constantly and even switch the blog you are posting to by tapping the three dots when writing your post out. Making it much easier to access.

iPad Support

You can now use Micro Social on all iPads as you would do on your iPhone. There no new layouts here, so don’t expect wonders, but basic support with new navigation menu works really well.

Bug Fixes

• Books has received a complete overhaul in caching and rebuilt adding and moving books to make it work better.
• Photos and images in the timeline gets a much needed update to ensure caching and API calls are working well together.
• Smart mentions also received some bug fixes and UI updates.

Micro Social version 1.6 brings powerful share sheet capabilities to your microblogging experience. Now you can share content directly from any app to Micro Social with rich formatting and customisation options.

Share Sheet Features

Link Sharing

Share articles and web pages with automatic title and URL extraction:

• Title is automatically captured from the webpage
• URL is properly formatted
• Selected text is preserved as a quote
• Custom comments can be added

Image Sharing

Share images directly to your posts:

• Multiple image support
• Alt text support for accessibility
• Preview before posting

Text Sharing

Share text content with rich formatting:

• Preserves original formatting
• Supports markdown syntax
• Maintains line breaks
• Handles special characters

Link Post Formatting

When sharing links, you can now customise how they appear in your posts. In Settings, configure your preferred format using these placeholders:

• {title}: Article title
• {url}: Article URL
• {quote}: Selected text (automatically formatted as a blockquote)
• {comments}: Your comments
• {newline}: Line break

Default format:

[{title}]({url})
{newline}
{quote}
{newline}
{comments}

Share Sheet Workflow

1. Select content in any app
2. Tap the share button
3. Choose “Micro Social” from the share sheet
4. Edit and customise your post
5. Share to micro.blog or save in the app for later.

Supported Content Types

• Web pages and articles
• Images and photos
• Plain text
• Rich text
• URLs
• Selected text

Download Micro Social to get started.