May 2021 Development Roundup (Patreon)

Hey all!

This month I mostly worked on a new web app, called Link Cleaner, as well as an update for Wikipedia Search. All the deets are below.

Link Cleaner

You might have noticed when sharing web pages that the links can sometimes be very long, especially on shopping websites. Most of the time, the extra bits at the end aren't needed at all for someone to arrive at the same page, and long links can take up a lot of room in text conversations. Removing the unnecessary parts is usually easy on a desktop PC, but the process is harder on mobile devices (or anything else with a touch screen).

There are already a few websites and native Android applications for this, but I wanted to make my own that can speed up the process as much as possible. And thus, LinkCleaner.app was born.

Link Cleaner is a Progressive Web App (PWA) that removes unnecessary parts of web links in one click. It supports multiple methods of sharing/pasting, so the process is as quick as possible on whatever platform you're on. For devices with a physical keyboard, pressing CTRL+V in the text field might be quickest. There's also a button for grabbing links from the clipboard automatically, which uses the modern Clipboard API (which requires permission first to access the clipboard). After the link is processed, you can copy the link to your clipboard, share it to an app installed on your device, or clean another link. 

Link Cleaner's best feature is that it supports the Web Share Target API, so when you install Link Cleaner to your home screen with most web browsers on Android (including Chrome and Samsung Internet), Link Cleaner appears as an option in the share menu for other apps. Once you have a link you want to send to someone, you can just send it to Link Cleaner first from Android's share menu, then Link Cleaner can send it somewhere else in one tap.

I'm really happy with how Link Cleaner turned out, and while it's mostly feature-complete already, I am planning to improve the installation process. Apple doesn't support the Web Share Target API, but I can make a Siri Shortcut and add it to the Link Cleaner home page for easy sharing on iOS.

Wikipedia Search

My Wikipedia Search browser extension celebrated the 10th anniversary of the first release last month! It has been over a year since the last update, so I started working on another update in May.

So far, I've updated the design and layout of the welcome and settings pages, to match recent updates to my other extensions. I've also added a setting that turns off Wikipedia Search's multi-language support, where you can type a language code followed by your search query to temporarily search in a different language (example: "es Google" searches "Google" in Spanish Wikipedia). This feature can sometimes cause unintended results (as pointed out in a bug report), like searching for "law" in the Latin Wikipedia if you type "la law", so the new setting will come in handy.

I've also been rewriting some of Wikipedia Search's internal code, so that changes to the settings no longer require the extension to 'reboot' itself. I plan to fix a few more reported bugs, then release it this month (June).

PhotoStack

The recent major update for PhotoStack broke the app shortcuts that appear when PhotoStack is installed on some platforms (including Android and Chrome OS). This was fixed during May.