November 2025 Work Log (Patreon)

Hello again! Here's everything I worked on during the month of November, including updates to Peek and Link Cleaner, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

Peek

It's been a while since the last update for Peek, my browser extension that adds mouse-hover previews for links. I released Peek v6.1 in November, just in time for its 10th anniversary—the first version is from November 24th, 2015.

Peek's main goal is to show previews for documents (like PDFs and Word files), media files (like MP4 videos), and links that can be easily embedded. This update was mostly code cleanup and bug fixes, but there were a few link types that turned out to be easy to implement, too.

First, there's improved support for YouTube links, based on recent work I did for Link Cleaner. Peek now properly detects YouTube shortlinks (youtu.be URLs) and YouTube Music track links (music.youtube.com URLs), in addition to the regular YouTube video links that already worked. If a timestamp is present in the original link, that is also now carried over to the link preview.

I also added support for Apple Music and Apple Podcast links, including albums, individual tracks, podcast shows, and podcast episodes. It turns out Apple uses the same embed code across all links on those services, so that wasn't too difficult to implement. More types of Spotify links also now work in Peek.

Peek v6.1 also has a minor design tweak: the popup now has a frosted glass-like background. That should help Peek fit in with the current system aesthetic on Windows 11 and macOS 26 Tahoe, but not to the point of making the Peek text or buttons unreadable.

There are still some bugs in Peek that I wasn't able to solve with this update. Link previews for search result pages in Google Search, Bing, and regular DuckDuckGo are all broken right now, due to a combination of layout quirks and anti-scraping measures. Link previews for Reddit, Instagram, and other sites are also blocked in Firefox by the browser's Enhanced Tracking Protection. I documented them in GitHub issues so others can give it a try if they want, and I'll take another look myself in the future.

Peek v6.1 is now available on the Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons repository, and Microsoft Edge Add-ons site.

Link Cleaner

I rolled out a few minor updates to my Link Cleaner web app in November. First, the Clear button in the URL field now appears for all devices, instead of just touchscreen-focused clients like smartphones and tablets. If you already have the URL in your clipboard, you can just click the paste button, because it clears the text field as the first step.

I've personally always used Ctrl+A/Cmd+A and then the Delete key, but many other desktop sites have a clear button for search fields, so it makes sense for Link Cleaner to have that as well.

If you use the Link Cleaner bookmarklet, the "Copy" button has been replaced with a "Copy & Close" button. This copies the cleaned URL to your clipboard and then automatically closes the Link Cleaner popup window.

One fewer click to worry about! If only web browsers would allow automatic copy to clipboard too...

Spacebar

I published one articles on Spacebar in November: Is Android really the next big desktop operating system?

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