March 2022 Development Roundup (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Here's the detailed roundup of everything I worked on during the month of March, exclusively for patrons.

Picture-in-Picture Shortcut

This month I released a new browser extension for Google Chrome, called Picture-in-Picture Shortcut. I already wrote a post about it, so I won't restate everything here.

PhotoStack

PhotoStack, my batch photo editor, was released in May 2019 and is pretty much feature-complete at this point. However, there's still a lot of room for interface improvements and under-the-hood fixes, which is what I worked on during the month of March.

The main change is that PhotoStack no longer requires the jQuery library, which cuts about 88KB of JavaScript code from the loading process. PhotoStack 1.0 made heavy use of jQuery, but some of the code was removed with the release of PhotoStack 2.0 in 2020. More of it was removed in early 2021, when PhotoStack was updated to use Bootstrap 5.0, which removed jQuery as a requirement.

There were still a few places using jQuery, mainly responsible for showing and hiding Bootstrap modals (like the watermark popup), keyboard shortcuts, and creating arrays of JavaScript Promises for processing images. Over the course of a few days, I replaced all that with regular JavaScript code that the browser itself can interpret. Now there's less code that needs to be executed every time PhotoStack is opened!

Besides code cleanup, I also implemented the overscroll-behavior: contain CSS property in PhotoStack. This prevents mobile browsers from reloading the page when you swipe down from the top of the screen, which is really important if you're working on a lot of images and don't want to lose any data.

Nexus Tools

I mentioned in my February Development Roundup that my Nexus Tools installer had become broken, after Google updated the files it's supposed to download and install on the user's computer. The problem was due to a bug in the Dart Archive library, so I quickly updated Nexus Tools to download the older (and still working) versions of those files until a fix was ready.

The maintainer of the Archive library released a new version in March that fixed the bug, so I updated Nexus Tools to once again download the latest Platform Tools package from Google. Back to normal!

Cobalt

I'm still working on Cobalt, my new FreeDOS distribution. I've paused working on the operating system itself while I investigate USB booting support, which is apparently pretty difficult with DOS. Who knew!