April 2024 Work Log (Patreon)

Hey there! This is everything I worked on during the month of April, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

PhotoStack

It's been a while since I talked about PhotoStack! There haven't been any significant changes since the big update in July 2023, but I started working on it again in April. The changes haven't been rolled out yet.

The first upcoming feature is a light mode option, alongside the existing dark mode option. Most photo editing apps have a dark interface, with the image as the main focus, but only having a dark mode can potentially be an accessibility issue. With that in mind, PhotoStack will match your system's theme by default (just like Link Cleaner), but a menu for forcing a specific theme will be available in the main navigation bar.

I'm also working on some other design and usability improvements. The keyboard shortcuts are being revamped, though I'm not entirely sure how that will work yet. I want PhotoStack to have keyboard shortcuts that mirror Adobe Lightroom's keyboard shortcuts for the same actions, since PhotoStack was initially created to watermark images like Lightroom. I might also create more shortcuts for the same actions that mirror more typical desktop applications, like having Ctrl+S (or Cmd+S on Apple devices) open the Export dialog.

The update will also list the keyboard shortcut for exporting images. That's been in the live version for a while (currently Shift+E), but it's not listed in the keyboard shortcuts menu. Oops!

I'm expecting to roll out all these changes in May.

Cupertino

This month I released a custom theme for Firefox, called Cupertino. It's a theme designed to more closely match the system colors on macOS, based primarily on the color scheme for Apple's own Safari web browser.

Cupertino isn't a complete visual overhaul for Firefox, but it does have light and dark modes, a more minimal address bar (matching Safari), and slightly different colors for popup menus and sidebars. Firefox themes unfortunately can't make significant adjustments to the tab bar or the position of elements, or use the "frosted glass" background found in Safari and other macOS apps. This theme is as close as I could get!

You can download Cupertino from the Firefox Add-ons site, and the code is on GitHub.

The Spacebar

I published one article on The Spacebar in April: Steam is a ticking time bomb. I'm planning for the next article to be about using an original iPod in 2024, so stay tuned for that.

Tech Tales

The latest Tech Tales Podcast episode talks about Apple's mid-2000s migration from PowerPC processors in its Mac computers to Intel chips. Cody Toombs from Android Police returned for this one, and I think it was pretty interesting! You can listen to it on SoundCloud or YouTube, or just subscribe to Tech Tales with your podcast player of choice.

I also published a blog post explaining how I implemented chapter markers in recent episodes of Tech Tales, which required some experimentation to work across all podcast apps and YouTube.