PhotoStack development and planned updates to extensions! (Patreon)

Hi all! I wanted to write a quick post about a new web app I'm working on, plus some planned updates for existing stuff.

First, I'm working on a new web app called PhotoStack, which is already live at photostack.app. This is a tool for editing multiple photos at once, and will eventually support adding watermarks, stripping EXIF data, and exporting in multiple formats.

Right now it can only resize images, but just the work alone to import and export images took hours and hours. You can see all the planned features here. My goal is to have version 1.0 ready by early May, with full offline support, watermarking, and exporting in multiple formats.

Beyond that, Wikipedia Search is due for a major update. I just released version 9.1 with a few fixes and minor tweaks, but additional address bar features have been requested. I also need to convert the setting storage to the chrome.storage API, so the extension follows best practices, and I'd like to add Firefox support as well.

NoPlugin just received a major update, but at least one bug report has already come in, and it may be possible to fool webpages into thinking your browser has plugins installed. This will fix many sites that are currently broken with NoPlugin, because they (properly) detect that your browser doesn't have QuickTime Player or whatever other plugins installed.

On a related note, I wanted to include full support for the QuickTime Scripting API in the next NoPlugin update, which would allow sites with custom video playback controls to work again. However, I wasn't able to find a way to make sure the NoPlugin player and scripting API is initialized before the page tries to use the API. It's not a dealbreaker either way, since NoPlugin adds its own controls to any media embed.

Finally, the Peek extension is also due for an update. I'd like to rewrite all the jQuery code to native JavaScript, which should increase performance and lower memory usage. I'd also like to move away from the library currently being used to generate previews, because it causes the page to break if large amounts of previews are generated (Peek currently only allows 20 previews per page for this reason). Both changes will be time-intensive.

Anyway, that's where my projects are at right now. Supporting me through Patreon is immensely appreciated, and will help all these goals come to fruition.