Hey everyone,

First off, a Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!

Tim and I are very happy with the year devRant has had, and thinking back, there are a lot of 2017 highlights to recap. Here are just a few of the ones that come to mind (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff!):

- We introduced the devRant supporter program (devRant++)! (https://devrant.com/rants/638594/...). Thank you so much to everyone who has embraced devRant++! This program has helped us significantly and it's made it possible for us to mantain our current infrustructure and not have to cut down on servers/sacrifice app performance and stability.
- We added avatar pets (https://devrant.com/rants/455860/...)
- We finally got the domain devrant.com thanks to @wiardvanrij (https://devrant.com/rants/938509/...)
- The first international devRant meetup (Dutch) with organized by @linuxxx and was a huge success (https://devrant.com/rants/937319/... + https://devrant.com/rants/935713/...)
- We reached 50,000 downloads on Android (https://devrant.com/rants/728421/...)
- We introduced notif tabs (https://devrant.com/rants/1037456/...), which make it easy to filter your in-app notifications by type
- @AlexDeLarge became the first devRant user to hit 50,000++ (https://devrant.com/rants/885432/...), and @linuxxx became the first to hit 75,000++
- We made an April Fools joke that got a lot of people mad at us and hopefully got some laughs too (https://devrant.com/rants/506740/...)
- We launched devDucks!! (https://devducks.com)
- We got rid of the drawer menu in our mobile apps and switched to a tab layout
- We added the ability to subscribe to any user's rants (https://devrant.com/rants/538170/...)
- Introduced the post type selector (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...) (which will be used for filtering - more details below)
- Started a bug/feature tracker GitHub repo (https://github.com/devRant/devRant)
- We did our first ever live stream (https://youtube.com/watch/...)
- Added an awesome all-black theme (devRant++) (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...)
- We created an "active discussions" screen within the app so you can easily find rants with booming discussions!
- Thanks to the suggestion of many community members, we added "scroll to bottom" functionality to rants with long comment threads to make those rants more usable
- We improved our app stability and set our personal record for uptime, and we also cut request times in half with some database cluster upgrades
- Awesome new community projects: https://devrant.com/projects (more will be added to the list soon, sorry for the delay!)
- A new landing page for web (https://devrant.com), that was the first phase of our web overhaul coming soon (see below)

Even after all of this stuff, Tim and I both know there is a ton of work to do going forward and we want to continue to make devRant as good as it can be. We rely on your feedback to make that happen and we encourage everyone to keep submitting and discussing ideas in the bug/feature tracker (https://github.com/devRant/devRant).

We only have a little bit of the roadmap right now, but here's some things 2018 will bring:

- A brand new devRant web app: we've heard the feedback loud and clear. This is our top priority right now, and we're happy to say the completely redesigned/overhauled devRant web experience is almost done and will be released in early 2018. We think everyone will really like it.

- Functionality to filter rants by type: this feature was always planned since we introduced notif types, and it will soon be implemented. The notif type filter will allow you to select the types of rants you want to see for any of the sorting methods.

- App stability and usability: we want to dedicate a little time to making sure we don't forget to fix some long-standing bugs with our iOS/Android apps. This includes UI issues, push notification problems on Android, any many other small but annoying problems. We know the stability and usability of devRant is very important to the community, so it's important for us to give it the attention it deserves.

- Improved profiles/avatars: we can't reveal a ton here yet, but we've got some pretty cool ideas that we think everyone will enjoy.

- Private messaging: we think a PM system can add a lot to the app and make it much more intuitive to reach out to people privately. However, Tim and I believe in only launching carefully developed features, so rest assured that a lot of thought will be going into the system to maximize privacy, provide settings that make it easy to turn off, and provide security features that make it very difficult for abuse to take place. We're also open to any ideas here, so just let us know what you might be thinking.

There will be many more additions, but those are just a few we have in mind right now.

We've had a great year, and we really can't thank every member of the devRant community enough. We've always gotten amazingly positive feedback from the community, and we really do appreciate it. One of the most awesome things is when some compliments the kindness of the devRant community itself, which we hear a lot. It really is such a welcoming community and we love seeing devs of all kind and geographic locations welcomed with open arms.

2018 will be an important year for devRant as we continue to grow and we will need to continue the momentum. We think the ideas we have right now and the ones that will come from community feedback going forward will allow us to make this a big year and continue to improve the devRant community.

Thanks everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!

Looking forward to 2018,
- David and Tim

//
// devRant unofficial UWP update (v1.5.6)
//

Hi!

A new update for Windows 10 users is in certification right now (will be available in a few hours/days), with the new feature you could see a few days ago on the official client.

But the main reason of this post is that I've seen the success of the official Issue Tracker created in August by @dfox and @trogus on GitHub.
For this reason I decided to do the same for the unofficial client.

Feel free to post bugs reports (I prefer this method instead of emails) and requests of features (even if not available in the official client) you would like to see.

https://github.com/JakubSteplowski/...

Complete changelog of v1.5.6:
- Added new 'post type' selector for easier classification of rant types in the future;
- Added Official devRant unofficial Issue Tracker on GitHub;
- Added Feedback page with link to GitHub Issue Tracker repo;
- Added black theme... no, wait... already there.
- Minor UI improvements;
- Minor back-end improvements;

I hope to see a lot of interesting feature requests I will enjoy to implement to make the UWP client always the best for you, Windows community. 😁

// Snippet
if(isUsingEdgeOrIE(window.navigator.userAgent)){
window.location.assign("https://google.com/chrome/browser/");
}

*sigh*

People laugh at it when you say Internet Explorer is a Pain in the *ss to develop for, because they think it's just a cliché or some sort and think it's not that bad.. but no .. really.. F*ck IE.. :D It f*cked me over so many times..

"Oh Hey, I don't recognize this basic html attribute value you are using, so I'm not going to report an error in the console or so, ima let you search, sweat, get angry, .. Oh Hey, you're not using the right doctype? Let me crash your entire javascript functionality, .. Oh Hey, this CSS selector? I never heard of it.. "

I never felt this satisfied in my entire life,
So I was working on an open-source org where people can come and read books online for free. But they were facing the challenge of making books text selectable with the mouse pointer. But the problem was that their website renders scanned images of the books so it is impossible to select text from it.
So I solved this problem by building a small prototype that could do it. All of the books that they have in their database are having XML files associated with them which contains the coordinates of each word. So the logic was simple - select a rectangular region to pass its coordinates and check whether the coordinates of a word are lying in that rectangular region or not and display them. This trick is helpful because most of the OCR generates a similar XML file.
So if you wish to use this prototype for your own projects - you can check my GitHub repository https://github.com/ishank-dev/...
please star it if you like.

Updated the devrant-web block/filter script, it now also filters based on avatar link, to not have random "commented on your rant" leak into your notifications - forgot myself I've had that script, you're of course welcome to block me too, if I annoy you, that'll make both out lives on devrant easier: https://github.com/7twin/...

Best paired with the notification categories too: https://github.com/7twin/... for an overall better experience.

Just make sure to use tampermonkey, as other implementations usually lack half the necessary style injections, selector supports etc.

I might revive my plugin'able cross-platform (desktop, ios, android, web) app too, which would out of the box feature this and many other things.

Just created a tiny (not yet stable) selector library that allows you to change properties on multiple elements just like you would do on a single one. It also has some more useful features. https://github.com/kosimst/kazel
Still in development, but prototype should work. What do you think?

this aint working for some reason. unless im missing something then im completely stumped.

https://gyazo.com/37598c63be6af4702...

can someone please tell me what’s wrong?

It’s an array of objects that im trying to turn into options for a selector with the id prop being the value and the name prop being the actual text but it keeps saying select.add or appendCHild isn’t a function. now im lost.

god i hate tests, i know they are needed but damn

Since most open-source projects that I use have been mentioned, I'll just mention the last one I've found about and it made my life easier:
Flameshot - https://github.com/lupoDharkael/...
It's a screenshot application that allows quick screenshot editing and has a comfortable area selector. You can see what I mean on github page.