End of the line

I’m sorry to announce that the Procrastinate extension will no longer be developed. I’ve postponed this decision several times, but the fact of the matter is that between my professional and personal life, there’s no time left for anything else at the moment.

Thank you very much for your support and I hope you enjoyed using Procrastinate.

Procrastinate version 2.0.2

A small bugfix release, meant to solve problems with the toolbar not hiding disabled services between Safari restarts.

Thanks to Bob for reporting this error!

Update Process

Safari automatically checks for updates of installed extensions. If you have disabled the setting to automatically install updates, you’ll have to open the preference panel and click the install button next to Procrastinate in the Extension Updates overview.

Download

If you haven’t download Procrastinate yet, here’s your chance! Procrastinate is available here; more information is available on the Procrastinate Safari Extension page.

Feedback

As usual, send comments, feature requests and bug reports to procrastinate.support@gmail.com. Procrastinate also has its own dedicated Twitter account: @procr_app.

Did you know?

I’m aware that not everyone enjoys reading product descriptions, specifications, release notes, long blog posts, … But if you don’t, you might miss out on some interesting features Procrastinate offers.

Therefore, I’m starting a Did you know? series which will highlight one particular Procrastinate feature, with as little text and as much pictures and/or videos as possible.

Expect the first Did you know? post soon. Hope you’ll like it!

Another small sneak preview

Here’s another preview of the upcoming bookmark page, this time for Pinboard users.

Features to look out for:

• Default tags: specify one or more default tags in the extension preferences. These will be passed with every bookmark.
• Autocomplete for your own tags: Procrastinate will fetch your Pinboard tags in the background. As soon as you start typing in the tag field, it will suggest possible tags you’ve used before.
• Suggested tags: Procrastinate will show the tags suggested by Pinboard for the given URL.

Ask a question

Initially, I introduced ask a question feature to provide low-barrier feedback. However, its current implementation is far from useable: e.g. answers will be posted to the blog, whereas the question itself might not serve a general audience. It’s not really suited for questions that require additional information either. Therefore, I’m retiring this feature from the blog.

Hold your horses!

This doesn’t mean I don’t want to receive your feedback. Quite the contrary, but I want to be able to manage it better. That’s why there are still three options left to make yourself heard:

• UserVoice: look at the left edge of of your browser window. Do you see the Feedback tab? Use this is you have a feature request. Other users will be able to cast their vote as well, thereby automatically sorting feature requests according to popularity.
• Twitter: Procrastinate is present on the all-popular Twitter network. Look up @procr_app and interact!
• E-mail: Lastly, if you have a question that fits neither of the above channels, or you’d rather get up close and personal, drop me a mail at procrastinate.support@gmail.com procrastinate.support@gmail.com.

Sneaky sneaky — A sneak preview of 2.1!

I’m already hard at work creating version 2.1 of Procrastinate. Although only a minor version increase, it’ll contain quite a few changes and also some new (awesome!) features. Here’s a preliminary list of what to expect:

• Delicious support will be dropped. An explanation of why is available in a previous post.
• Support for historious bookmarking service.
• Refinement of the visual feedback effects in the toolbar: aim here is to avoid showing duplicate or even contradictory feedback.
• Aligned available actions along all services (see screenshot): al actions are named Add with the option differentiating them between brackets, e.g. Add (unread).

• Full Pinboard API integration (instead of reusing the bookmarklet code).
• Default tags for Pinboard and historious.
• Embedded bookmark page: probably the biggest feature addition in this release. Procrastinate will no longer redirect to the services’ own bookmark page (as it did with Pinboard) but will implement its own. The bookmark page will include suggested tags, tag completion, … (depending on the service’s available features of course).

Now that you know what’s coming in version 2.1, feel free to provide me with your thoughts on the current version. What do you like and what makes you go “Meh”?

Not so Delicious

I’m afraid I have some bad news for users who depend on the Delicious features of Procrastinate. Starting from version 2.1 (which is currently being developed), Delicious will no longer be supported.

The reason for this is twofold:

1. For some bizarre reason, Delicious still uses two different APIs and two logon mechanisms, depending on when you created your account. “Original” users can use HTTP authentication, while Yahoo! members are authorized via OAuth.
2. OAuth is not something you can properly implement in JavaScript and thus in a Safari Extension. Due to the nature of Safari Extensions, both the key and secret used by OAuth have to be included in the source(*). And as there’s no way to stop anyone from “decompiling” (actually unarchiving) your extension, this data is up for grabs.

With the addition of historious to Procrastinate’s offering, it became clear that due to the reasons listed above, Delicious was hampering further development and meant Procrastinate would be limited to redirecting a user to Delicious’ site.

I’m sorry for those who are impacted by this decision, and I sincerely hoped you enjoyed using Procrastinate. Remember that you can always choose to keep the current version, as long as you don’t auto-update your extensions. Note that support will be limited to the latest version of Procrastinate though.

For those in need of an alternative, there’s Socialafari and Safarious. The latter only supports OAuth authentication for now (oh the irony!), while Socialafari uses the bookmarklet codes (which should work with either authentication mechanisms).

(*) The wonderful Ostrich Safari Extension does support OAuth and has done so without including key nor secret in the source. This involves using a server to store them instead.