December 2021 Development Roundup (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Here's a log of everything I worked on during the month of December, exclusively for my Patreon supporters.

Pluto Editor

Last month I started working on a new project that I'm not sure will turn into something long-term or not. It's called Pluto Editor, and it's a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editor for Markdown text files. I've been working on the outlines for my podcast in Markdown, and I hadn't really found an editor I've liked, so I'm attempting to make one.

Pluto Editor is a Progressive Web App (accessible from plutoeditor.app), with full offline support and the ability to be 'installed' to your home screen/app list on some platforms. It uses the new-ish File Access API to open, modify, and save Markdown files stored your computer, just as a native text editor would. For browsers without that API (such as Firefox, Chrome on mobile, and Safari), it can still open local files, but your changes have to be saved to a new file.

Pluto Editor uses the fantastic Showdown library for parsing Markdown files, so it can already parse most Markdown formatting. There's also a word and character counter.

Long-term, I'd like to add more formatting buttons and options (like the ability to create and modify tables), as well as some sort of cloud storage support. I'm not sure when or if any of that will happen, though.

WhatDevice

WhatDevice is a web app I originally made in 2017, which can display some information about the hardware and software of whatever you are using. WhatDevice never caught on in the way I was hoping for, and it’s also becoming progressively less useful. Web browsers are starting to clamp down on methods for checking your hardware and software configuration, because they are often used for fingerprinting (a way to identify a user besides the IP address).

I made the decision last month to shut down WhatDevice on May 8th, 2022, since the registration on the web domain ends at that date. The web app won't be accessible after that point, but the source code will remain available on my GitHub account for the foreseeable future.

Nexus Tools

Last month I updated Nexus Tools to version 5.4, which attempts to address a bug someone on the Discord server, where the installation directory was not being added to the %PATH% variable on Windows. Unfortunately, I don't think that update totally fixed the issue, so another update will likely be needed to iron that out.

Best Buy Search

Last month I released a new browser extension specifically for Firefox, called Best Buy Search. It adds the retailer Best Buy as a search engine to Firefox... and that's it. I mostly made this for my own use, because Firefox doesn't properly sync custom search engines unless it's part of an extension.