A word of warning

Please make backups before updating, as it’s guaranteed that you will start from scratch after the update. If you update Ampersand on your phone you will see two “Ampersand” icons - the old one and the new one.

Since this update, you may notice that opening up Ampersand, or saving something will trigger a loading screen. This is intended behavior, the app will feel slower but it’s actually not. This had to be done as people would spam click the save button or close the app without letting the app finish saving, resulting in data corruption.

Some users will face issues with Ampersand 0.3.0: if that happens to you, we’re sorry but the best way to go about it is to start from scratch, as we’re unable to fix previous exports that you may have corrupted by wrongly using Ampersand (as an example, by double clicking save icons even once.)

New Features

• Analytics: get detailed info on your system’s switches. See who fronts the most on average, who fronts more often during a certain time of the day, who tends to co-front a lot;

• Reports: export a human-readable file about your system and its switches (including analytics) in the last 120 days. You can choose which system(s) to export from and whether to include custom fronts;

• Reminders and fronting notification: you can now set reminders that will fire off on front changes. You can select whether to fire the reminder to all members, or just specific ones. Additionally, in Accessibility you can now toggle an option that will send you a notification containing the current fronters. Great for reminding you who’s there even when the app is closed. If you happen to swipe the notification away, reopen the app and it should reappear. Notifications and reminders work on Android, iOS, Windows and MacOS, but they are unsupported on Linux;

• Comments: you can now add comments from other members to message board/journal posts and fronting entries. Someone has got to make snarky remarks about you doing a terrible job at being the host;

• Sticky Notes: they’re supposed to replace the “show system description in dashboard” setting. You can use them to store information that you want everyone to know at a quick glance: ex. info and directions for newly split alters, grounding resources, etc…

• Composable dashboard: you can now toggle and rearrange different parts of the dashboard as you please! We’ve also added settings that let you control for how long message board/journal posts/switched out members show on the dashboard. Yes, you read that right: you can now see recent journal posts on the dashboard. Additionally, you can now change the style of the current fronter carousel, two styles are available: cards (the one you’ve known for ages) and list (the one used in the member tab);

• Customizable navigation bar: you can now add, remove, and rearrange what tabs appear in the bottom bar for quick access. Tabs hidden from there will appear in Options; (Note: if you’re on mobile and have more than 5 tabs shown, scroll the bar to see the rest.)

• Savable filter queries and improvements: filter queries have always been a core function of Ampersand, but they could be long and tedious to type so most people didn’t bother using them. But now you can save and retrieve them with just a few clicks. Also, remember those long IDs you had to copy and paste? They’re now a thing of the past. Thanks to our contributor Fulmine, you now can search by their name, ex. typing @member:mia will show you all entries made by a member named [Mia](pic of Mia here) (our mascot!) Same thing works for @system, @tag, etc… It also works for mentions, ex. @<m:holly>;

• List view for journals and fronting history: this was originally a feature back in the 0.0.1 alpha, but was removed due to performance issues. It’s now back, and better than before! If you struggle using the calendar view, consider giving the list view a shot;

• New languages: the app is now available in Brazilian Portuguese and Estonian;

• New appearance options: choose from 6 different font styles, 4 color schemes (from neutral to vibrant), and a background color different from the accent one;

• Name styles: personalize your name in member profiles with our font collection (or use your own from the Asset Manager), and different styles like bold, italic, glowing text and more;

• Tint with color option: you can now choose whether the app should retain its accent color or adapt to the preferred color specified in member/system/tag profiles and journal posts (yes, we added the option to color journal posts in this release!);

• Improvements and additions to Markdown: there’s new syntax that allows you to add text dividers, filters, toggles, ranges, progress bars and much much more to your fields! In addition to that, the parser is now stricter and more consistent about what’s allowed in Markdown and what isn’t. Some tags, like [bg], now support recursion, aka. [bg=red]red [bg=blue] and blue[/bg][/bg].

• Frontmatter: Ampersand now supports parsing frontmatters in Markdown text fields. This means you can use supported properties to… really, just read the wiki.

Changes

• Multiple authors: you can now choose multiple authors for message board and journal posts;

• Improved search: you can now search inside member descriptions and custom fields. No additional syntax required, just type as you normally would;

• Age as default field: it was one of the most widely used custom fields so it’s now a default one;

• Last fronted on member profiles: that’s right, you can now see the last time a member fronted right on their page;

• Liquid Glass: Apple devices now get an Ampersand icon consistent with the rest of rest of their UI;

• Default tab setting: it now allows you to choose any tab added to the tab bar;

• Better Tupperbox imports: now requires you to input your Discord ID so that Ampersand can use it to ask Tupperbox’s CDN to get member images. Also imports generated by premium users are now properly supported.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a serious bug where users were able to bypass the password confirmation screen;
• Fixed a bug where custom fields didn’t always get deleted if they were imported from third-party apps;
• Fixed various bugs and crashes revolving deleted members;
• Fixed a bunch of edge cases with third-party imports;
• Fixed some issues with our .ampar exports.