@Joseph-T

Changes Made

Added a confirmation modal for the extension marketplace, hid the users home path, and Fixed a bunch of bugs.

Confirmation Modal

I added a modal that warns users against downloading extensions that could be harmful.

Hiding the users home directory

In the scenario that the user is recording a video or something where they use this app their user name on their computer could have been revealed, which is not good to say the least. Now that is no longer an issue, because we obfuscate the home directory, replacing it with a tilde

Bugs

1. The Cancel button on the modal wouldn’t close it.
2. Stuck in the download state when downloading an extension
3. Extension marketplace still showed previously downloaded extensions

Changes Made

I worked on fixing some bugs for linux, so it should now have support for Wayland.

Wayland bug fixes

Wayland is an API for accessing the user layer of a linux machine. Quite a few distro’s use Wayland for this however my code was not the most compatible with this so I needed to write a bunch of code so some components work with it. The biggest bug was that the global shortcuts were not registering.
Sorry about the lack of video

Changes Made

I worked on the algorithm for recommending land, and I ported my Express app to Github Pages. I also redid the UI

Recommendation algorithm

The algorithm just takes the ratio of required land, and compares that to the ratio of the land that is already in the deck and tries to match the two, it just works slightly better than before and accounts for more edge cases

Github pages

Github pages is fully static, meaning I had to trade out all my server side code for client side stuff, it doesn’t affect the user too much, but limits the app in the long run. But anyway you can actually use it
now.

Updated UI

I just think it looks slightly better, and provides more feedback on the search, and gives slightly more info on the card. As I am sure you can tell front-end is not where I excel, but it is slightly better than before.

Changes Made

The app now allows for the user to select what extension they want to call using the mouse, it also has a better GitHub action yml, and finally npm tests

Mouse selection

Before the app was entirely keyboard driven their was nothing for the mouse to even interact with. I prefer it like this but their is now the option to select extensions with the mouse instead.

GitHub actions yml

The way I publish the app executable is with GitHub actions I will call an action that compiles the app and publishes the compiled app. But now it will also automatically update the version number so I don’t have to

Tests

I forgot to make tests for the longest time for this app and I finally realized it so I added them

Changes Made:

I added a linux version, it should work on most distros. I also cleaned up the codebase.

The linux version

It may not work on all distros I only tested Fedora KDE, but from that test it looks like it functions almost fully however I still need to get the code for global shortcuts updated so that also works on linux. The file should download on most distro’s its an AppImage (the executable), not a .deb file I had one but switched to purely AppImage, soon afterwards, it should not affect the user.

Cleaned up codebase

All functions and classes now have docstrings, this way I can tell what I wrote the function to do later. I also removed some redundant checks.

Changes Made

Added an Icon to the app, fixed a hundred different bugs, added a fallback for the duckduckgo extension, and added the extension descriptions to the help menu

The icon

I added an icon its very simple, and definitely subject to change, but now it does not have the default electron icon in the task bar.

Bugs Fixed

1. Changed the codebase to made up of several modules instead of a few giant files (Should have done it a long time ago)
2. Fixed the time formatter for the timer
3. Changed the commit hash of the GitHub extension
4. Changed Priority order

Improved Duck duck go extension

The duckduckgo extension uses their quick search API, which returns a JSON, in which the answer sometimes is in JSON.abstract and sometimes JSON.relatedTopics[0].text Now the extension looks in both places and returns the most relevant answer.

Extension descriptions

I recently added descriptions of the extensions in their metadata so now on the help tab you can get small descriptions of each one.

Sorry about how their have been no videos but it has all been fixing a lot of small bugs most of which don’t even make it into the dev-log.

Changes Made

Added start on boot and safer extension marketplace.

Start on boot

The app will now set itself up so if in settings you enabled start on boot the app will automatically start itself when you boot up your computer.

Safer extension marketplace

The way extensions work is all the extensions listed have a GitHub repository linked so when the user downloads the extension they download it off the repository, but the developer can change the GitHub repo so after it is accepted as safe the developer can change that without any warning. So now we grab from a specific point on the git tree. However even still the Dev can change the history so we check that the commit hash matches the stored hash meaning the developer cannot change their extension after approval


Sorry for the lack of videos again its really a backend change

Changes Made

I added an auto update code and added metadata to extensions

Auto update code

Before I added this code a user would have to delete the current code, and reinstall the application from GitHub. However this code will automatically detect and update the app on the users machine.

Added metadata to extensions

This allows for extensions to give data about them to the extension marketplace giving users a better idea of what they are downloading.


Sorry for the lack of videos, it was really a backend change

Changes Made

I added aliases and Improved the search.

Aliases

Aliases are a user configurable feature that allows the user to type /<Shorthand> which will immediately be turned into some text. For example instead of writing “Google chrome” I can type /google which will be converted to Google Chrome Users can configure as many of these as they want.

Improved search

On the first ship I got complaints that the search did not always return an answer when asked questions. For example Where is Canada would return an invalid answer whilst Canada returned a valid answer. I added a fallback to make these scenarios less common.

Changes Made

Improved fonts and spacing, improved opening apps, shows the icon of the app. I also improved the calculator

Improved fonts

I was just using the default fonts earlier because I am not very creative, but I decided to change it to Inter and Consolas.

Improved app opening

Earlier to determine the apps the user has installed as a temporary solution I just scrapped their desktop. But that did not return everything, and I finally fixed it I tried a bunch but the that worked for me was using some commands through power shell. That gets all the apps that windows knows about.

The icons

Now the program will show the user the icon of the app they want to open. there are three different kinds of app Id’s in windows and I have to assess their photos differently for each, which added alot of complexity and is the whole reason this devlog took so long.

Better calculator

The calculator has a few improvements the first being it now has the constants pi and e baked into it. It can also now do square roots and trigonometric functions. The trigonometric functions are interesting because they can be done with radians or degrees if the user types sin(90deg). It will use 90 degrees instead of the default being radians.

Changes Made

Report broken site link

Report Broken Site

Because there is no standard for what metadata should look like for websites. Some websites need exceptions and their own special code so I made a report broken site button that reports any broken sites to me. So I can get that website working in the next version

Changes Made

I added a list extensions feature, added extension specific settings, and removed a few nasty bugs.

List all extensions feature

All it does is when you press ? it will list all the extensions and you can just select the one you want from there.

Extension Specific settings

The settings page used to just have settings for the app now under the extensions tab will have extension specific settings that the dev of the extension can use.

Bugs

1. The implementation for removing the previous answers did not always remove all of the answers and sometimes left the user with answers that shouldn’t be there. I did a small rewrite which fixed the issue.
2. The autocomplete feature did not like the list all expansions feature because the program will refuse to give answer past a certain amount of them to prevent 20 answers being given at once. But because the list all feature could expand to that point, the autocomplete feature thought there wasn’t enough room for it. But now I delete the previous answers before creating new ones for autocomplete.

Changes made

I made a far better readme.md file, and I added documentation for making your own extensions and pipelines

Documentation

I added very specific documentation for making your own extensions and pipelines. I don’t recommend making your own pipeline, because that is still in early development, but if you don’t have a stardance project yet I would absolutely recommend trying to make your own extension. It is difficult the first time but pretty easy afterwards.

Changes Made

The application now allows for several citation formats

New formats

The application used to have just MLA 8 citation but it now has support for ADA, and Chicago citations as well as a settings page to change the citation you prefer to use.

Changes Made

I finalized details for easy install and using it for the first time. Simple things like improving the functionality with the tray (the bottom right icons).

How to use

Whenever you want to open it you can either press Alt + Z or open the tray and press the icon see the image below for an example.

Changes Made

FInalized a few details and made it work with google chrome

Google Chrome Support

Google chrome prefers that when using the browser API you use the chrome class instead of the browser class, it also costs 5$ to put it onto the marketplace.