December 2020 Roundup (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Most of my free time in December was spent finishing up NoPlugin 7.0, which I already posted about. However, I did also work on a few other things.

Nexus Tools

Nexus Tools is my super-simple installer for the Android Platform Tools package of applications, compatible with Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, and Bash on Windows 10. In December, I released v4.4, which fixed an issue that was commonly reported on Macs.

Part of the install process is adding a certain folder (which contains the installed software) to the user's system path, allowing them to type in "adb" instead of "/home/user/nexus-tools/adb." Nexus Tools previously only completed this step if the "~/.bashrc" (Bash) or "~/.zshrc" (Z Shell) files with the path variable were already present. This isn't an issue on most Linux systems, but at some point, Macs stopped creating the file by default. Nexus Tools now creates those files if they don't already exist.

I'm hoping to release another update to Nexus Tools sometime in January, adding support for Apple Silicon Macs. It seems like the Android tools themselves work fine under Apple's x86 Rosetta compatibility layer (Google doesn't yet provide native binaries), but I still have to add the proper logic for detecting the architecture to Nexus Tools. I don't have an ARM Mac, so I'll have to sit in an Apple Store or Best Buy for a while for testing.

Techathon

This doesn't really count as a purely development project, but I helped put together the Techathon charity livestream that ran on December 18th. It was an event created and hosted by myself and several other tech journalists, and we successfully raised $2,820 for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.

If this sounds like something you might want to watch, definitely follow Techathon on Twitter and Twitch so you'll know when the next one takes place.