April 2023 Development Log (Patreon)

Hey everyone! This is the detailed roundup of everything I worked on during the month of April 2023, exclusively for patrons.

Link Cleaner

Link Cleaner is my web app for quickly removing unnecessary junk from web links. I rolled out a few minor changes during April, starting with a fix for the bottom navigation bar on devices with overlay navigation (like iPhones without physical home buttons) when Link Cleaner is installed to your device. You can see a before and after comparison below on an iPhone 14 Pro.

I also decided to move Link Cleaner's settings (which currently consists of two options) from a dropdown on the main page to a separate page, accessible from the navigation bar. This will make it easier to add more settings in the future, since they don't need to be duplicated across the normal mode and bulk mode pages.

Finally, I made a few minor fixes to the CSS and meta tags, including switching Link Cleaner to Boostrap's new built-in dark theme.

Shopping Sites List

I maintain a list of shopping websites, which is primarily used for the site detection in my Wii Shop Channel Music browser extension. In April, I merged some pull requests and closed some issues related to adding more sites. The list now contains 1,655 sites!

My Wii Shop extension checks for updates to the list every time you restart Chrome, so the changes should be live for most (if not all) extension users by now.

Nexus Tools

Nexus Tools is my installer for ADB, Fastboot, and other Android SDK Platform Tools. It hasn't been updated since December 2021, since it's still working perfectly as far as I'm aware, but I have wanted to implement a few minor improvements, especially on Windows. In the past 30 days, Nexus Tools has been used 531 times on Windows, compared to 431 on Mac, 38 on Chrome OS, and 85 on other Linux platforms.

I'm experimenting with using the AppData folder as the installation directory, instead of the home directory, since that's where single-user applications are supposed to be installed on Windows. I also updated Nexus Tools to appear in the Installed apps menu in the Windows Settings app (or Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel), with a shortcut to uninstall it. You'll still be able to remove it by running "nexustools -r" on the command line.

The Settings menu entry was surprisingly difficult to get working, because Microsoft doesn't have great documentation for it, especially for single-user applications like Nexus Tools.

I'm looking into other possible improvements for Windows, like improved support for ARM Windows PCs (now that I can test that with Parallels on my MacBook) and maybe a shortcut in the Start Menu. There might also be some documentation improvements and fixes for non-Windows platforms, too.