Quick Reads, quicker than ever

I'm always looking for little ways to make Quick Reads better. Sometimes that means big feature updates. Other times it means subtle quality of life improvements. Today I released one of those small quality of life improvements.

A lot of users will keep Quick Reads open in a browser tab all day long. Maybe it's a pinned tab or whatever, but they save things that they want to read later and expect those to show up in the queue when they go back to it. However, that didn't always happen because while the queue did auto refresh, it didn't do it as frequently as was needed. Also, if you navigated to a different page, it would actually stop refreshing (a bug I hadn't noticed until today).

When I was building Nonogame, I knew that I wanted to pause the game when the user navigated away from the tab or went to a different window. Thankfully, the web supports this, so I was able to detect when the window was no longer in the foreground and pause the game automatically. As you may expect, the web also has ways for you to detect when the window comes back to the forefront, and I'm using that in Quick Reads to automatically check for new things in the queue when you navigate back to the tab.

Here's a demo of it in action a few minutes ago in production. I'm saving things from Birchfeed and a random website with the browser extension, and both of them show up effectively instantly in the UI when I go back to the Quick Reads tab. I hope you like it!

Not the main point of this post, but I've mentioned 3 of my products in here…that's synergy, Lemon.