Text Fill

Devlog 3

(Made in Python)

 
It’s been more than a week since my last devlog. This is mostly because of me working on other projects, and also that there really wasn’t much to show. It was mostly just figuring out the syntax and bug fixing, so I decided to wait until I finished.

This should be my last devlog before my ship, and I have added something which I think is a great improvement.
 

Project Recap

For those who don’t know my project, it’s called Text Fill, and it is a tool that I am making in Python, where you can define shortcuts and phrases, so when you type in the shortcut, it automatically replaces it with the phrase.
For example, if you have set a shortcut to /email, and the phrase to [email protected], when you type in /email anywhere with the program running in the background, it will automatically replace it with the phrase
This is useful if you have to type a specific phrase very often.

My Big Change

(I use a mac)
I had shown my project to my brother, and he liked the idea, but just randomly mentioned that it would be cool if it would show up on the menu bar, where things like the time and wifi are. I thought it would be cool and did some research, and realized that it was possible. I chose to use a package called Rumps, which allowed me to do this, and I basically made a completely new version of my app. Luckily, the old functionality code could be kept, I just had to change the UI. I also made this version much more simpler and streamlined you could say, mainly because I wasn’t able to add half of the functionality using Rumps(It’s probably possible, I just wasn’t able to), and it just didn’t feel right having something piled with unnecessary features in the menu bar.

Two Versions

So now, I have two versions of the app. One supports Windows + Mac, and has it’s own separate window. The second version is on the menu bar, and it’s much more streamlined, but also only for Mac. So I made both available on my Github page as a Github Release which you can try out using the demo link.

Permissions

Unfortunately, my project requires a lot of permissions that have to be manually enabled by the user, which makes the Quick Start, not very ‘Quick’. I tried to make the process simple, but I couldn’t really do anything since devices don’t just trust random apps. So it takes a few more minutes then it would have without permissions, but I made sure to include a detailed README so no one gets stuck.

I’m going to ship my project probably by the end of the day, and hopefully it’ll get accepted.

Thanks for reading until here!

Belows a screenshot of how it looks in the menu bar!