July 2020 Roundup (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I'm starting a new series of posts exclusively for Patrons where I go over every single update to any of my projects over the past month. There are a lot of changes that aren't really important enough for a dedicated post, so a roundup makes more sense. I'll still continue to make dedicated posts whenever major updates go live.

Without further ado, here's everything I worked on during the month of July.

Tipjar

I've been teasing this on Twitter and Patreon for a little while, but I'm working on a new browser extension called Tipjar. It makes funding your favorite sites and content creators as easy as possible — if the page/website you're viewing supports direct contributions, a dollar sign button appears in your browser's toolbar.

Tipjar is designed around the "support-link" meta tag, which sites can add to their code to tell Tipjar where the donation/support page is. My hope is that if Tipjar becomes popular enough, browser vendors will consider adding a check for the meta tag on their own.

Until adoption of the meta tag becomes mainstream, Tipjar also checks for a variety of other payment methods (Scroll subscription, Bitcoin, etc.). I'll talk more about Tipjar soon — it's roughly 90% completed.

PhotoStack

My web-based batch photo editor, PhotoStack, received a few new features in July. App shortcuts are now available when you 'install' PhotoStack to your device using a Chromium-based browser, so you can quickly jump to your favorite functions. I talked about it more in this Patreon post.

As of a few days ago (July 30th), the image export process has also been improved. Before now, exporting images on PhotoStack would actually involve two tasks: generating the final images, and adding all of them to a ZIP file for the ZIP download option. However, the ZIP file creation actually takes longer than creating the final images. On top of that, PhotoStack's analytics says that over the past few days, only 14% of people used the ZIP option.

PhotoStack now delays creating the ZIP file until you actually click the ZIP export button, which makes the initial export process significantly faster (around 4x in my quick testing). It's pretty great.

I have a few other minor improvements in the works for PhotoStack, so stay tuned!

ImageShare

ImageShare, my web-based image sharing tool for game consoles and other low-end devices, had one super minor update earlier this month. It now uses a tracking pixel for Google Analytics, instead of the full JavaScript package, so it should now load faster on low-end devices like the Nintendo 3DS.