Quick Reviews is a little passion project of mine. It's one of those apps that someone makes to solve their needs, and they release it just in case someone else finds it useful. I'm happy to report that numerous people use the site, but I am definitely its biggest user. I use it to post a review of every movie I watch to a thread on Mastodon, and I've been doing that since sometime in 2021 (although it was on Twitter back then).

A Brief History

1. Alpha: I had a messy Sketch document (2020)
2. Beta: I cleaned up that doc and shared it with the world (2021)
3. 1.0: I made a web app (2022)
4. 2.0: I rewrote the web app (2023, today)

What's New in 2.0?

TLDR:

1. Upload, drop, or paste in posters
2. Export as a PNG
3. Mobile users get a much better export than before
4. Keyboard shortcuts for all common tasks
5. Still runs 100% in your browser, I don’t see anything

The first headline feature is that you no longer need to paste in the URL for your poster image. You can simply drag in an image from wherever you'd like and drop it into your review (or click to use the file browser). The previous method was annoying at best, and often impossible on the iPhone or iPad.

Oh, you can also paste an image from your clipboard. I used ChatGPT to help with this feature and several others in this update, and I documented that workflow in this video if you were curious. Pasting doesn’t work on iPadOS, I have no idea why, and it’s basically impossible to troubleshoot, so I’m sorry about that.

The other headline update is that you can export your review as an image, no more needing to screenshot it manually like an animal! If you prefer the screenshot method for any reason, well no one can stop you and it should look just the same as before.

A side benefit of this export option is that the exported image is now decoupled from your device size, so even people on a phone can export a full-quality image, and not the derpy mobile version you got before.

Another big feature addition is keyboard shortcut support. Most things can be done with a shortcut, including:

• CMD+E to edit the review
• CMD+S to save the review as an image
• MD+1 to give a "poor" review
• MD+2 to give an "okay" review
• MD+3 to give a "good" review
• MD+4 to give a "great" review

I added a favicon…finally!

Finally, and this is a niche thing, but you can now style your review text with HTML tags. There’s no WYSIWYG editor or anything, but if you know what you’re doing you can make things happen.

Quick Reviews Runs 100% in Your Browser

Just like before, Quick Reviews is completely private and I never see anything you're doing on the site. Getting this to work with the new functionality wasn't super easy, but I'm glad I was able to do it in the end.

The short of this is that Quick Reviews runs 100% in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and it uses local storage to remember your text, poster image, and color customizations.

A Few Regressions

I have removed the ability to change the names of the 4 review scores. I haven't seen this option used by anyone in the wild, and it took up valuable space, so it got the boot.

The site does not look prefect on mobile today. The export is perfect, but the page itself is a bit janky now. Usage on phones was basically zero, so I hope this will not be an issue.

I also removed the Quick Reviews watermark from the top of the review. I’m not making any money on this or anything (in fact, the more it’s used, the more it costs to run), so I took the branding away. People still asked me where I made these images anyway, so it didn’t seem to be solving much of a purpose.

Finally, you used to be able to edit the review inline and now you need to open a modal to edit. This is due to the way I have to render the review as an image so you don't have to take a screenshot anymore. I tried to account for this change in behavior by opening the modal when you click on any of the text.

My First 2.0 Release!

And that’s it! I hope that those who used Quick Reviews before enjoy it more, and if this is your first time hearing about it, I’d love it if you tried it out and used it to share your thoughts on movies or whatever else you want with it.