June 2021 Development Roundup (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I know I'm a few days late with this, but here's the roundup of everything you Patrons helped me work on this month.

Wikipedia Search

This month I rolled out a minor update to my Wikipedia Search browser extension. You can read all about that here.

PhotoStack

I rolled out a new feature to PhotoStack this month: cropping! This is something I've wanted to add to PhotoStack for a while now, but I wasn't sure how to implement it in a way that would be helpful for batch operations — most images are cropped one at a time by dragging an area over the image.

The new crop feature allows you to define how many pixels you take off of each side. You see a live preview of the crop as you change the values, as with all of the other settings. It's a great way to apply the same crop operation to hundreds of photos at once, like screenshots of games with a non-native aspect ratio.

Link Cleaner

My web app for quickly removing extra bits from web URLs, Link Cleaner, got a small bug fix during the month of June. It now properly detects YouTube links with "www" at the start and doesn't remove the "v" parameter (which is needed to link to the video) from those links.

Tech Tales

This isn't related to my software development at all, and this Patreon is not supporting it, but during the month of June I started a new podcast called Tech Tales. It covers interesting stories in the technology world, with the first few episodes covering the PlayStation phone (Xperia Play), Intel Itanium, and the troubled development history of Mac OS X.

If you're interested in listening, you can stream it for free on SoundCloud, and I have links to subscribe with popular podcast players on my site.