Hi!Looks like Apple broke the ability to swipe back to thumbnails from a full article. :/
They also broke RSS On Watch, a Watch app that I used to browse feeds. Sure would love a synced copy of Heartfeed on my wrist, escpecially if I get the new larger watch.
Swiping back functionality should still work (on both iOS 11 & 12), but there is a caveat on iPad. After introducing a new preview window on iPad which "hovers" above the thumbnails, swiping back worked in one place but not another:
- If you read the standard way, i.e. click on thumbnail -> see hovering preview window -> click to read on the web -> read full article, swiping back from full view to "hovering" preview window did not work. This is because of the way the full article view works (this is really Safari baked into the app) which is only allowing swipe back if you swipe back to a fullscreen window. So with the new preview window being smaller than fullscreen, no swiping back.
- If you instead jump directly from thumbnails to full article, either by long-pressing the thumbnail or by having preference set to reverse normal click & long-press, you can swipe back since the thumbnail view is fullscreen.
I myself really like the hovering preview, both aesthetically and functionally (being able to click on a thumbnail behind the preview to dismiss it I think works better than swiping back). But some users really preferred being able to swipe back on an iPad, always, so I introduced a setting to enable the preview window to always go fullscreen on iPads (i.e. the old way), so now one can choose which to have.
Personally, I would like to have swipe back functionality to the hovering preview, but as mentioned, so far no luck with that for me. But I think it should be possible to code around but so far my attempts have failed. Darn.
Hope this clears things up. If not, or if swiping back does not work for you as expected, please get back to me.
As for Apple Watch, I'm still interested but still hold back, both by time constraints (although I hope to get more time for Heartfeed soon) but mostly due to me not owning one since I'm not a watch person, and I think trying to make a good watch app without being able to test it on actual hardware would be stupid. So we'll see what happens