URLCheck has now over 1000 stars on Github

Just as the title says, the URLCheck repository on Github had surpassed the 1000 stars limit!

It may or may not be a big achievement, but still I think it's something worth publishing. At least for me it's incredible!

Unfortunately, right now I don't have any new big update planned for the app. But the previous one introduced automations, which I think classifies for it (even if probably that feature helped getting those extra final stars :P ).

In any case, there are still new versions planned, that I'll continue to release from time to time, with new features and improvements.

Thanks to all of you! 

New version of URLCheck (V 3.0)

V 3.0
- New: Automation (vote winner)
- Change: Text input edit mode is now a popup
- Fix: Uri parser should no longer decode twice
- Improve: Updated main screen icons

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Version 3.0...this is in fact a big update, even if the main feature it adds is still very basic.

Presenting: Automation!

This new feature will allow you to perform actions automatically based on predefined inputs. As a first version only basic triggers will be available (when an url matches a regex) and basic actions (basically pressing the ui buttons) but I plan to add more complex triggers and actions in the future (someday!).

With the basic current version you can now, for example, react to urls that match a given regex, and then open automatically the preferred app, or trigger a virus total analysis, or enable incognito, among a few others. Think of this like the regex setting in the status check module (which will be automatically migrated to an automation entry).

This feature was the vote winner, a vote that I setup on Github a couple weeks ago...and I didn't totally forgot to publish here on the blog until writing this...oops (sorry!)

Hopefully this will make some people very happy, even if the setup is a bit complex (requires json).

There are also a couple other improvements, but the only noticeable one is the new popup for the text module edit mode, as with the automation it was very difficult to either trigger everything while writing, after a couple seconds of pause, when losing focus, magically adding an 'apply' button... The popup allows to better edit the url on my opinion anyway (less crowded).

New version of Average Data Usage Widget (V 4.1)

V 4.1
- Added Russian translation. Thank you kojjii!

New version of Click to chat (V 5.1)

V 5.1
- Experimental Viber support
- Experimental Generic Intent support
- Grouped settings

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Added experimental Viber support.

And also (because why not) an experimental way to add any intent support.

Will it be useful? No idea!

I also made visual changes in the settings screen, it was too long, now they are grouped into one of three groups.

Edit: An issue was discovered regarding the keep prefix feature. A fix was sent for review, with the same version.

New version for CollapseClosingTags and MavenDependencyCollapse (jetbrains plugins)

- Fixed ActionUpdateThread.OLD_EDT is deprecated and going to be removed soon

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Just a quick update of my two jetbrain plugins. CollapseClosingTags and MavenDependencyCollapse.

Basically to fix a deprecation error that was shown almost each time you right clicked an xml file.

I also remove the plugin template code, since it was too complex and too many things that I just wasn't using. Now it's the plain new project sample from Intellij itself, with the custom code.

I did kept the changelog plugin though, it was the only easy way I found to sync the plugins descriptions between the readme and the plugin itself.

New version of URLCheck (V 2.17)

V 2.17
- Improve: Input Text module display
- Improve: Hosts module will check for subdomains too
- Fix: Avoid crashes when decoding invalid text
- Fix: Avoid crashes with malformed queries
- Fix: Updated invalid lastUpdate of ClearUrl catalog
- Fix: Module enable switches was sometimes reset when the app was sent to the background
- Fix: Double decoding of url parts

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In reality just a small update, but maybe it's useful for someone.

New version of Click to chat (V 5.0)

V 5.0
- Internal code migrated to Kotlin

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This update does not contains any change visible to the user, but internally the whole codebase was migrated from Java to Kotlin.

I love Kotlin, but until now using  kotlin always increased the app size by a crazy amount (at least the apk). Last time I tested it, however the size increase was minimal (it did increase, but similar to the increase of adding a new asset).

I'm going to take this opportunity to test the java->kotlin migration in a real-world scenario. This update will be available only as the beta of the normal (not donation) version. And it will stay there for a couple weeks. Once I'm sure it is as usable as the java one, I'll upload it as stable (only the normal, not donation) and carefully monitor the usage, crashes and real size.

This will tell me once and for all if Kotlin is now a good replacement for small apps, or if it's just a java syntax-sugar with a crazy overhead.

I'll try to post my findings.

Findings: The size increases, but it is almost unnoticeable (signed full apk: 200Kb->242Kb). It seems that the trick is to target java 21...hmm 🤔 Fine for me!

New version of URLCheck (V 2.15)

V 2.15

- New: Animations (can be disabled)

- Fix: Better rejected detection. And allow to disable.

- Fix: Custom tabs should work in more situations (links not opening)

- Fix: Emojis and other non-standard characters on the Uri parts module

- Improvement: Better error message when a module can't be enabled

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Nothing specially interesting, maybe the animations, but a couple important bugs should be fixed now (some links not opening and improved, again, the rejection detection)

New version of UrlCheck (V 2.14)

V 2.14
- New: Backup/restore screen
- Removed support for Android 4.3 and below
- Updated internal versions

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Probably the one with the smaller features/time ratio!

There is only one new feature, but it's not a minor one, and it took me several years of planning, and a couple months of implementation:

Now you can backup/restore the app data.

Yes, that's right, that feature is finally here. This should hopefully allow people to keep a copy for preservation, allow to migrate data between devices, or even switch from different releases (like migrate from play store to fdroid).

The functionality is quite straightforward, but I managed to add a couple toggles to choose which data to backup/restore. The error management is a bit lacking unfortunately, I want to improve it in the future but for now I'll just wait in case bugs are reported.

The downside is that the backup required a functionality only available on a newer api version (for Android 4.4) and I decided to remove support for older versions (4.0.1 - 4.3). Considering that android 4.3 was released on early 2013 (more than 10 years ago), it's reported to run in less than 0.3% of available devices and most (if not all) of apps require android 5.0 at best (usually 8.0), I think it's fair.
Note: I don't like removing support for older devices, but in this case adding custom code to allow using that version required to include almost a full file picker implementation. I'm not using the app-compat library, not even sure if it will help though. If you are still using that version for some reason, you can still use the previous version without issue.

 

Special thanks to Ilithy for the original suggestion and general help.

You still here? I'll tell you a (not very) secret then: the backup file is just a zip! And the contents are mostly txt files! You can open it and check how the data is saved, or even modify and see what happens! (remember to keep a backup just in case...which now you can!)

New version of Average Data Usage Widget (V 4.0)

V 4.0
- Updated to Android 10+
- New: Average and total data on the history screen
- Tweak: Remaining tweak promoted to full setting (Pending/Used)
- New: Option to calculate accumulated data by setting the desired visible amount
- Improv: Accumulated data can be negative
- Improv: Accumulated data can be set while accumulated period is 0 (as offset data)
- New: Tweak: open android settings when clicking the widget button

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I almost forgot.

So yeah, this is an app that I made a long time ago, and that I had to stop developing because it required a permission that (I though) was no longer possible to obtain.

In order to get the data usage, originally you had to use a method that required the phone id. Getting that id required a phone permission, and that permission was not granted anymore for apps targeting Android 10 and up. The deprecation notice said to use an alternative, but I was never able to make it work. So I just kept the app at that working version, and never updated it.

Fast-forward a couple years, and I discovered that you could use the alternative, but only if you allowed ONLY android 10 and up, which meant that, by updating the app, existing phones could no longer use it (original: 7-9, new 10+). So I just kept avoiding updates.

Fast-forward a couple more years, I have now a new Android 12 phone, and Android 8 is now considered 'old'. So I implemented the change (which allowed me to remove the phone permission), and a couple others I always wanted to make (this is an app mainly for myself after all). Play Store is no longer displaying apps targeting versions older than 10, so this was perfectly the best moment to do so.

 

Hope it's help useful for someone, it was for me.