September 2023 Development Log (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I'm a few days late again, but here's everything I worked on during the month of September 2023, exclusively for you patrons.

Picture-in-Picture Shortcut

Picture-in-Picture Shortcut is my browser extension that adds a keyboard shortcut and toolbar button for opening the currently-playing video in a small floating window. I released version 1.3 in September, and also published the extension to the Microsoft Edge add-ons site for the first time.

Before now, PiP Shortcut would show a notification when it was first installed, which was the same design I used for other extensions. That has now been replaced with a welcome page, which also acts as the settings page, like the recent updates for my other extensions. The update also fixes a bug where the default keyboard shortcut was displayed as blank.

Link Cleaner

My Link Cleaner web app received a few more improvements in the month of September. First, Link Cleaner can now clean links copied from Google Search results, which are usually an indecipherable mess. Support for cleaning YouTube links has also been improved, though it's still not perfect — at some point I need to go through all the different link formats that YouTube uses and get it working better.

I also made a small UX tweak to Link Cleaner in September. When you click the social media share buttons or the Test Link button, the action will now open in a small pop-up window on desktop platforms, instead of a new full browser tab.

The old behavior was jarring if you were using Link Cleaner as an installed web app. Mobile browsers will keep opening the actions in full-screen popups.

Peek

I'm still on-and-off working on the next update for my Peek browser extension, which I talked about in July. In September I worked on more refinements to the popup UI, mainly the new larger buttons that are more usable than the demos I showed off before.

I'm not entirely sure if this will be the final design or not. Maybe the settings button should be a help button instead, even if it takes the user to the same page? We'll see.