Maya

After a little bit, finally pushed to production once again with a huge batch of new updates! Since the last dev log, I merged all the open PRs including many translation ones (French, Croatian, and German), added job cancellation to vertd, fixed some general & translation bugs, and added .amf, .asf, and .nut (video formats) support. I also added an advanced settings' dropdown to clean up & hide many of the conversion settings, and appended a(Language)" suffix to the language setting if the locale is anything other than English.

Finally pushed to production one last time for the end of Summer of Making, I didn't do as much projects but I very much enjoyed being encouraged to ship projects <3

holy moly, this one commit took me absolutely forever to do. i basically had to rewrite how one of the converters (magick-wasm) was used so that i can implement something that should've been thought from the beginning: removing files actually stops the conversion now. removing files before would not actually stop the conversion job & keep running in the background. magick-wasm specifically was rewritten quite a bit to follow ffmpeg.wasm and pandoc to allow for me to cancel individual conversions/jobs.

i also had to fix up all the converters/workers to use proper types as for some reason, WorkerMessage and other types existed but weren't being used (yay i love variable: any), which that also took forever.

finally, fixed up alac support (no, .alac doesnt exist lol) by exporting as .m4a, and now you can paste files directly into the browser.

Going home from vacation soon, but been working on a few more QOL features for VERT and planned for many more once I'm back. Since the last dev log, I've added two new options to the conversion section: default conversion format and a toggle for the metadata. The default conversion format feature took a lot longer than expected because I had to fix issues with the existing dropdown format option, including making sure it's actually centered properly and moving to be within the viewport if it will appear outside. The toggle for the metadata was easy enough but it required also modifying vertd to accept a keepMetadata option in the request, and I made some optimizations to the conversion page.

I'm so glad the ship of the large update was a success! I'm currently working on some smaller QOL fixes and features - fixed metadata being stripped (and I'll have an option to keep or strip it in conversion settings), more reliable video thumbnail generation, more verbose worker logs so it's clearer what is going on (or went wrong), and improving the performance of image conversion by removing an old workaround. Previously it converted the image into a PNG blob, read it again as a PNG, then wrote the new image file in its new format to fix issues with some formats not converting properly but it seems it's not needed anymore, thus improving performance (and fixing the metadata lol)!

After some delays and a couple months of work, we've finally pushed all the changes to production and everything is running smoothly - time to ship <3!

Since the last dev log, I added some new conversion settings which allow you to control the quality of the conVERTed file - images (w/ similar system to JPEG quality percentages), audio bitrate, and audio sample rate! The audio settings have common presets and auto (or custom for sample rate) which is the default behaviour of detecting the bitrate/sample rate of the file from the previous dev log. I also updated most of the packages and a few more bugs were fixed relating to the navbar, language dropdown, & other UI.

I made the announcement and changelogs on the Discord and it's being received well, with very few issues arising. Funny thing is that we were literally suffering from success as many people were trying to use the site at the same time - it caused download speeds for the conversion workers to fluctuate heavily (sometimes into the KILOBYTES per second). It made sense as many things, and I believe workers as well, were updated so everyone had to redownload them and update their cache.

Been on vacation for the past month and a half (or so), so I haven't made too much progress on many projects but since the last dev log, I've fixed a few bugs - language detection (on first load), handle the set all dropdown better & chromium scrollbars shifting DOM (by using the overlayscrollbars package). I've also deferred loading the stripe scripts until someone actually goes to donate and handle the audio bitrate much better - using ffprobe, detect the audio bitrate and use that when converting to other (lossy) formats (or fall back to ffmpeg's default bitrate on error, for the format). If the original file was lossless, we default to 320kbps. These were requested by people on the Discord so thank you!

I also had tried to do a basic implementation of PDF support by combining a few NPM packages, but I was not happy with the results (doing pdf conversion on the browser is killing me). Also attempted some work on a new conversion resolver but I've saved that for later.

Not too much today, made a bunch of fixes to the language (e.g. detection), general UI, and especially dropdowns. Can now convert gifs into videos again (and vice versa) and I also fixed the set all to (format) dropdown to work properly with files that could use more than one converter (e.g. ffmpeg and vertd possible). I was also messing with GitHub's CLI to try to build vertd statically, but that was a pain and I gave up lol, while someone submitted a PR to add documentation to vertd which I reviewed and approved. Some more things planned before the large release!

Yesterday was a pain lmao, I was trying to figure out why there was the issue where there is a flash of the wrong theme when the page is loaded for the first time, but turns out it was.. cloudflare cache. i wasted so many hours fixing that, but oh well. I fixed up a few more bugs with the UI/dropdown, added spanish translation (thanks to a person who want to be anonymous), and EVEN more formats - swf and many RAW camera formats (~20). I was also investigating things we could use to implement PDF conversion as well, and there are a few options for it we could consider.

Did a lot more investigating on what formats I can support on VERT, and now I've added another 22 formats, audio and video. Adding support for new formats take a long time because of the research, finding sample files, and figuring out what actually works and stuff. SVG to raster is also finally supported by rendering a canvas (since magick-wasm doesn't support it).

Did a few bug fixes today and yesterday as well - some UI changes w/ dropdown and the donation card, and MIME types making certain browsers automatically change the file extension, :p

Preparing for a large update since it's been a while, I merged a few branches into a singular one to make it push out all the changes in one (as every commit on the main branch automatically deploys to prod @ vert.sh) - video <-> audio conversion, translations/i18n, and the 100+ new image formats from previous devlog. Took quite a bit to merge them together, fix the conflicts, and then test it all out but it all seems to work fine now. Worked on cleaning up the FFmpeg worker code and make it somewhat more reliable (falling back to a default color of just black if there is no cover art), and then did many fixes to the tooltips, dropdown, scrollbar, and cards (especially because there is so much new formats for images now!).

Lots of work this morning/afternoon with investigating what formats magick-wasm properly supported on VERT - using some code to help automate some of the process of extracting the magick-wasm's constants for what formats it can read, and then converting into those (and then from those), I got a huge list of new formats that are now known to work on VERT - 135+ new formats.. this took forever lmao.

First devlog for VERT on Summer of Making! Coming back to VERT after a hot minute since I was busy with quite a lot of other projects - VERT is a project I worked on with nullptr a while ago. Today, I worked on many things, mainly the translation system that's been long awaited - it took much longer than I thought because of having to painstakenly move all the hardcoded strings into a JSON. At first I experimented with ParaglideJS, but i was told of a new project called wuchale which seemed very promising, but couldn't get to work w/ lack of docs & issues.

Before this, I did a lot of smaller bug fixes on the UI (mostly via cherry picking from a branch), added oga/opus support, a small highlight to the format dropdown to show the format the file is already in, and seeing the full filename on hover.

Many more updates for v1.2.0 of the app, and probably where I'll ship it with! I added a manual update section for people to update manually if unsupported through web (or unsuccessful). I also added a demo mode to the app mostly so people here can actually try it out (without any of Shiftall's products)! There's many more updates & fixes too, but that's where it's at so far, time to ship!

Someone had helped me translate the project to Japanese so I added that, and the rest of the time was trying to use WebUSB to update the GX(6/2) dongles referring to a bunch of existing code and nRF documentation. I think it's been figured out but because of how Windows works with handling USB drivers.. it will just never work. I love Windows. I need to test it out on MacOS, Linux, and mobile at some point but other than that, project's pretty complete (as much as I can w/o other firmware files). Might as well ship the project without the GX dongle support (which is in another branch).

Added a step 0 (that's optional) to check the version of the devices before updating, actually disable the buttons if Web Bluetooth is disabled, more abilities to translate things (such as release notes), and add more toasts that pop up so it's more obvious to mobile users what it's doing.

Sadly I forgot to do devlogs when I started the project.. but oh well.

Added a FAQ to the site (w/ troubleshooting stuff as well). Made it fully translatable with some quirks to keep the links actually clickable and stuff.