February 2022 Development Roundup (Patreon)

Wow, this month sure flew by fast. I was pretty busy with my actual job over the past month, but here's a roundup of everything I worked on, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

Wii Shop Channel Music extension

My Wii Shop Channel Music extension went semi-viral again in January, after I published the v2.0 update. That led to a surge in pull requests, bug reports, and feature requests — most of which I sorted through during the month of February.

There were a whopping 77 commits to the extension's code during February, most of which added more shopping sites to the detection list. I also merged a pull request that added a volume slider, and a few others that added new music. After fixing a few minor issues on my own after that, all the changes were published as Wii Shop Channel Music v2.1. There are now 493 sites properly detected as shopping websites!

I'm looking into a two more possible features for the extension (the ability to set any site as a shopping site, and importing your own music), but besides those, I consider the extension more or less feature-complete at this point. I'm still going to fix bugs and accept new websites, but I don't want to spend a ton of my time over-engineering what was originally a fun joke project, especially when Nintendo's lawyers could probably issue copyright takedowns.

Link Cleaner

Link Cleaner is my web app that allows you to quickly "clean up" links (remove tracking code and other unnecessarily variables) in one click. In early February, I added a QR code button that provides a QR code image for the processed link, so it can be easily shared with any nearby mobile devices.

I also added OpenSearch engine support to Link Cleaner, which creates another way to quickly send links to Link Cleaner. Put simply, Link Cleaner tells web browsers that it has search engine capabilities, so it appears as a search engine option in your browser (alongside Google, Bing, etc.).

On desktop Chrome, enabling the Link Cleaner engine means you can start typing "LinkCleaner" in the address bar, press Tab, paste a URL, then hit Enter. Link Cleaner will then open with the cleaned URL. It's a pretty great feature, though desktop web browsers don't seem to suggest enabling search engines in the way they do for installing sites as applications. I'm working on adding explainer messages to LinkCleaner for each major web browser to try and solve this problem.

Nexus Tools

Nexus Tools is my multi-platform installer for the Android SDK Platform Tools package, which includes ADB, Fastboot, and other applications. At the end of January, someone filed a bug report on GitHub that mentioned Nexus Tools was broken. After some investigation, it turned out it was actually broken on all platforms — uh oh.

The culprit turned out to be the latest update to Google's Platform Tools package, or more specifically, the .zip archive for the update. The file causes an error in the "archive" Dart library that Nexus Tools uses. I filed a bug report with the archive library, and the developer said a fix was in the works.

In the meantime, I did a quick fix for Nexus Tools that forced it to download the previous version of Platform Tools on all platforms. Once I get the chance to test the new 3.2.1 release of the archive library, and if that update fixes it, I can update Nexus Tools again to once again download the latest-available version.

ImageShare

ImageShare is a lightweight web app for uploading images, primarily designed as a replacement for the Nintendo 3DS Image Share Service. During February, I started work on the first significant update for ImageShare.

The current version of ImageShare is specifically designed for the New Nintendo 3DS and New Nintendo 3DS XL, but also works with the regular 3DS and Wii U. I spent a while adding a special dual-screen layout for the 3DS, but it never worked well, so the next update will remove it. It's not a big deal, though — instead of the QR code showing on the top screen and the upload button on the bottom, the QR will be on the bottom and you'll have to scroll with the stylus or joystick to see the other functions.

Dropping the special dual-screen layout makes other design updates easier. For example, this is what ImageShare looks like right now on large screens:

And this is what the in-development version looks like right now on large screens, which uses horizontal space more efficiently:

I also fixed another design issue in this upcoming update, thanks to the help of Nik on Twitter. It turns out ImageShare is displayed zoomed out (like a desktop site) on the old 3DS, because the web browser on the old 3DS doesn't support "initial-scale=1" in the viewport <meta> tag. I was able to fix this by detecting the old 3DS on the server and sending a special meta tag, which resizes the page properly:

The update also has a few new features on all devices. You can click/tap the QR code to open the image in a new tab, instead of always having to scan it. The game the screenshot came from is also displayed above the QR code (if ImageShare can detect it), and there's a button for deleting the image when you're done with it.

I'm hoping to release all these changes soon. I also have a video demo of the new version running on a New 3DS on my Twitter.