January 2021 Development Roundup (Patreon)

Happy new year everyone! January was the first month in a while I was able to get a decent amount of development work done, so I have lots to cover here.

Discord server

In case you missed my previous post, I now have a Discord server for discussing my software projects, including feature suggestions and bug reports. Patreon supporters also get a special label on their name.

I'm looking into the possibility of adding a bridge with Matrix or other chat platforms, so you won't absolutely have to use Discord, but that isn't ready yet.

Nexus Tools

Nexus Tools is my installer for Android's Platform Tools package (includes ADB, Fastboot, and many other utilities), compatible with macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, and other platforms. It's one of my most popular projects, with hundreds of users each month, and I was able to ship a few updates to it during January.

Nexus Tools now fully works on Mac computers with Apple Silicon processors — before now, it would tell Silicon Macs that their processor wasn't supported. The installed applications aren't yet running natively on Silicon, but they seem to work perfectly in Apple's Rosetta 2 compatibility later. Nexus Tools displays a warning during install that the tools aren't compiled for Silicon.

On most platforms, Nexus Tools now opens a page on my website after the installation is complete, which contains links to donate and an invitation to the Discord server. Finally, I rolled out a few fixes to Nexus Tools relating to Z Shell support, one of which was brought to my attention through the Discord.

PhotoStack

PhotoStack's original icon was taken from an icon pack for Linux desktop distributions, but now it has an original logo designed by my friend, Mason Conrad!

The new icon looks great on desktop and Android, and there's a slightly-tweaked version that appears when added to the home screen on iOS/iPadOS. The Play Store app still needs to be updated, though.

PhotoStack was also released on the Microsoft Store in January. It functions exactly like installing the PhotoStack to your PC using Microsoft Edge. If you don't already have Edge installed on your computer, you'll get a popup asking you to install it.

Finally, one bug was fixed in PhotoStack during January, which prevented container files (ZIP, MS Office files, etc.) from being properly imported.

PhotoStack Classic

PhotoStack Classic is an alternative version of PhotoStack, designed to retain support with older browsers and operating systems (even Internet Explorer 10!). It has most of the same features as regular PhotoStack, but isn't as optimized and uses the pre-2.0 watermark controls.

During January, PhotoStack Classic was updated to use the same versions of the Bootstrap UI framework and JQuery JavaScript library as the main PhotoStack application. The interface was also slightly tweaked to match recent changes in PhotoStack, and the icon is now a monochrome version of PhotoStack's new logo.

Peek

One of my oldest running software projects is Peek, a browser extension that displays pop-up previews when you hover your mouse over links to certain types of files. I've had a few people over the years ask me to expand Peek's scope to support more than just documents, so that's what I'm starting to work on.

The next update for Peek will add support for previewing links to certain popular websites — right now I'm going down the list of Alexa's top 500 websites and adding anything feasible that supports dynamic embeds. I already have previews for YouTube and Reddit links working, as seen in the below demo.

I've also started expanding Peek's settings with frequently-requested options. One suggestion that has come up multiple times is the option to change the size of Peek's popup. The solution is a little hacky, since the library Peek uses to generate popups wasn't really designed for user-customizable sizing, but it does mostly work.

The new option is displayed in the redesigned Peek settings page, which will likely have more items added to it as time goes on.

Peek hasn't been updated in over a year, so I'm also spending some time cleaning up the codebase. I've removed all mentions of Opera support (because of this), a bug that caused Peek to incorrectly detect links as insecure has been fixed, and the code for detecting Google Docs links has been reduced to a single regular expression.

I'll likely release these changes sometime in February, with support for more types of links coming in subsequent smaller updates. As the saying goes, "release early, release often."

NoPlugin

I released a major update for NoPlugin in December, but as it turns out, there was a bug that prevented Adobe Flash Projector from properly downloading on Windows PCs. This was discovered and fixed by Sai, and the changes were released as the NoPlugin v7.0.1 update.