Hey everyone, I’m told that we should make these monthly updates shorter and snappier so lets jump right in! This month has been very heavily focused on making the lives and work of the Translatonauts working on courses much much easier.

Lingonaut iOS – Two updates in one month!

From all the feedback and the crash reports we’ve gotten, it was clear that Lingonaut iOS needs more work under the hood, not only in terms of bugs and crashes but making the app work better on iPad and Mac. Build 31 focused on Quality of Life fixes and Build 36 focuses on adding visual polish and cleaning up the codebase!

Crash Resistance

We’ve made lots of changes to that end, for starters, errors that are accidentally introduced in the course making process will (in addition to being pointed out and automatically repaired by creatonaut) crash the entire app less frequently.

Going forward Lingonaut will first try to fix the syntax before skipping the question. This is a background service that will come in very useful after major updates to courses before bugs are found and reported. It also means early adopters won’t be punished as hard by being the first to stumble into these bugs!

New and remastered animations + designs!

With making Lingonaut compatible with larger screens for iPads and Android tablets it’s obvious that many of the designs, backgrounds and illustrations were really designed for smaller screens and either don’t look very good or just don’t fit on big ones!

Just upscaling them didn’t create work that we were happy with so instead many of the pictures and backgrounds you’ll see have been completely remade and retouched at up to 4x the original resolution!

We hope that as you’ll continue to learn your languages you’ll notice that things look quite a bit sharper with fewer visual artefacts than from the original designs frm years ago which were made with two sticks and a rock (and we had to share the rock!)

Now on iPad (but properly!)

Until now we’ve been focusing on iPhone and trusting the the Swift and SwiftUI framework would handle the transition to iPad, but this has left it being treated as an afterthought with the app scaling more like a big broken iPhone that you fight with than something actually nice to use.

We tried our best to make it compatible with Mac but were unable to make the same app bundle work across iOS, iPadOS and macOS simultaneously. After countless wasted man-hours it was decided to remove Mac support and instead direct people to use the Web client when it’s out which will be designed from the ground up to be used with a keyboard and mouse.

Lingonaut B36 releases on Sunday, 30 November.

Supercharging Creatonaut

Creatonaut, our course creation tool built for course creators but usable by everyone for free has received the most updates it has ever had in a single month, one every few days!

Everything has been laser focused on making things as easy as possible for them and to that effect we’ve shipped tons of changes, a new health report when exporting to pinpoint any issues as well as a beautiful new simulator that almost perfectly mirrors the iOS app and now lets you preview the course tree you’re creating for your course too!

That’s just a few of the features and they’re not even the biggest changes! You can view the full Changelog and well as screenshots below:

It’s now easier than ever to use Creatonaut and if you’re someone who wants to help us in creating new courses please join our launchpad! If you want to just have fun and explore with Creatonaut you can do that too! There’s no log in required.

The Patrons have spoken, Android will come before Web!

We ran a Patron-only poll as a patron benefit last month to decide the direction our project will take, do we take on the Web client next or Android? One month later, the answer is clear:

People want Android much much more! So that’s what we’ll prioritise. We want to get the alpha out by the end of the year but it’s not something we’ll rush.

Once again, because of our every-class-is-first-class policy, you can rest assured that the polish and quality of the web and android client will be at parity with the iOS app.

We will continue work on the both ports in the background, but if you want to help us and have programming experience, let us know!

We won’t be making the same mistake we did with the iOS beta – it will not be released until its in a state we are happy and proud of, regardless of pressure.

Terrestrial Tier Patrons and above will get access to the new client ~3 months before the Open Alpha then Beta

Venus, Mercury and Lapsed Patrons will get access to the new client ~1 month before the Open Alpha then Beta

(This is to add more value to the higher tiers and also help with surviving long enough to get it out!)

If you want to support the mission and help us get Android and Web over the finish line (and it is desperately needed, costs are going up and funding is going down) please take a look at becoming a Patron. You will get unique perks and cosmetics as well as our gratitude!

We’ve created a new Tiers explained page to go through all the membership tiers and perks! We’ve added even more perks too to boost value for your money without paywalling features from non-patrons.

We will always remain ad-free, paywall free and free of cost.

German and Czech courses

The long awaited overhauls to the German and Czech courses are here! With all-new skills and speech for every single question with human recorded audio gradually replacing text-to-speech as it’s recorded.

A Mystery announcement and a surprise

Some might have seen some memeposting on Reddit and BlueSky that seems awfully cryptic! What could it mean?

We also have a new video coming out soon on our YouTube channel, so make sure you keep a watch there! It’s almost finished and we can’t wait to show you.

Other news

• Hello Helsinki! 🇫🇮 – We have moved our server infrastructure from the U.S to Helsinki, Finland! All Lingonaut infrastructure is now within EU/UK territories, thus completely covering all Lingonauts under GDPR protections
• Make sure you Visit our BlueSky and Twitter! – We regularly post niche language facts and updates on both. A follow and retweets are appreciated as it helps us get word about the project out!

That’s all for this month! We’ll see you here next month, same-ish time and same-ish place!