UPDATE: This release is rolling out on June 24.
I’m grateful to everyone who has been inspired to back the Session Buddy development and support effort. To those who have donated, thank you!
While the funding goal that allows me to focus full-time on Session Buddy has not yet been achieved, last month’s proceeds will allow me to dedicate 35 hours of development and support in June.
I’m working on a number of improvements around search (see teaser above), as well as a handful of other enhancements and fixes that I will release by June 30 I am releasing on June 24.
Below is the full list of updates in the upcoming release. I hope you’ll find they make using Session Buddy even better.
And remember, Session Buddy is a community-supported project. If you haven’t donated, please consider a contribution so we can deliver all the good stuff that will make Session Buddy awesome.
Search improvements
- Non-matching tabs in search results are hidden, making it easier to find what you’re looking for. The count of non-matching tabs is displayed and you can opt to show them.
- Matched session names are highlighted on session tiles in the navigation pane.
- In 1-line view, a tab’s URL is revealed and highlighted if search terms match part of the URL.
- Window headers include a count of matched (as well as total) tabs.
- Hit Enter while the cursor is in the search box to focus the first tab result. Hit Enter again to open the tab.
- UI fades to provide a visual cue that a search is happening.
Miscellaneous enhancements
- In 1-line view, a tab’s abbreviated URL is revealed next to it when hovering over the tab title.
- In the OPEN menu, each menu item shows the number of tabs/windows that will be opened if selected.
- On Windows, F2 keyboard shortcut edits the name of the selected session (as well as W, as before).
- Session dates are prefixed with “Saved” or “Updated”.
Minor enhancements and fixes
- Search only matches on abbreviated URL (ie, without query portion) by default, making searches faster and results more relevant. A new setting has been added to turn this off.
- Search is debounced after the first character entry instead of immediately initiating a search.
- Shorter debounce on search keyup increases search responsiveness.
- C keyboard shortcut scrolls to the top of the navigation pane in addition to selecting the current session.
- Session edit icon refresh.
- Session tile details are simplified to one line; all tiles are now of consistent height.
- Default “Session Buddy” session includes several new helpful bookmarks.
- Fix for bug preventing search clear button from showing in some cases.
- Fix for bug causing the wrong number of sessions to be selected when drag-selecting session tiles quickly in the opposite direction of the selection range.
- Several optimizations and tweaks, including removal of unused code, streamlined code access to settings, and simplified settings checkbox code.
41 Comments
Chakra Willaims
Hi, love session buddy - Am donating and have had my friends donate too as we really love it.
If this is not already a feature (and I'm sure it's been mentioned 100 times) to be able to pull tabs together from different session to make new session would be awesome.
The use case would be that I could go through all my old sessions and drag out tabs that are of similatr categories (eg WP plugins) and then save the sessions as a type of bookmark folder (eg of all the WP plugins)
hansifer
Thanks, I appreciate your support!
One way to create new sessions from existing ones is to merge them. You can do so by selecting multiple session tiles (eg, via click and drag or ctrl+click), then clicking the MERGE button.
charlie
Could you include a notes section on the session buddy page? I only name certain important sessions and most of them are untitled. It would be helpful to have a little notes area where i could put reminders of these important sessions to search for.
UnnoTed
Hi, thanks for the extension.
Please add an option to automatically load the last session's tabs.
Derya Özkan
Hello,
First of all, thank you very much for this wonderful extension.
I have to ideas, with which I hope to contribute:
1) Being able to sync between different machines
2) Being able to copy links between different sessions (drag and drop)
Thanks
Fernando Mendes
Best app ever!! Getting better everyday!!
Justin
I love this application. I think a useful feature would be to have the sessions sync with your Chrome account so they will load when you log into Chrome on another computer. I would pay for that. Other than that I pretty much use this every day. Great app!
Henry B
I have been using SB for about 2 years and love it. Thank you so much for putting it out for free use. That said, I just never thought about who, how or why it came to be. I've tried several similar apps but for reasons I can't really quantify I settled on SB. It is now my second most used browser extension. I use it at least once every day. So when I saw your development update and request for donations I suddenly realized there is somebody out there actively engaged in the ongoing development of this app that I have been taking for granted. It works so well I had forgotten it is a third-party extension. So I decided to make a donation. And I'm a die-hard cheapskate. The only other application I have ever contributed to is Wikipedia. Please realize that I and I'm sure many, many others truly appreciate your coding and UI design skills. Bravo ZuLu!
hansifer
Thank you for your kind remarks. I really appreciate your support and am happy to hear you're getting so much out of Session Buddy.
Trong Bach
This is my best option to manage session. Just one more function make it awesome, sync. I think an easy way to make it work is just create a bookmark list for sessions, because bookmark is sync if we sign in to browser.
Thank you for making this extension! Hope to have sync option soon!
Лщыенф
Thanks for useful extension!
Dennis Lee
Thank you! Could you add window count for sessions back though?
Phil P
Thanks ! Keep up the good work !!
J11
great! Love session buddy
sastromo
* find duplicates!
* and some kind of online sync!
thanks for all the work!!
amazing extension!
Samson Bandy
Love Session Buddy
Glad to be a monthly contributor
It helps a lot
I'm not very tech savvy so perhaps you might have Session Buddy Tutorials?
Like a youTube thing
I think it would help all of us
And help keep and increase funding
One last Question
Can you make it so a person can delete multiple unwanted tabs at one time?
hansifer
Thanks for your contributions!
I'd love to do tutorials, especially video tutorials. I agree that this could be helpful to a lot of folks. However, for the time being with bandwidth as scarce as it is, I feel I should focus as much as possible on developing features so as to maximize the value for the user community.
Selecting multiple tabs and performing bulk operations (such as delete) on them is something I'm working on.
Gloom Demon
I would really like to be able to change the order of the stored sessions and their contents in the Session Buddy!
hansifer
Collection sorting is on the roadmap. Tab sorting, on the other hand, is already supported.
Frank
Just curious why not a gofundme for your app?
Get $ and exposure.
hansifer
Based on my research Patreon seemed the most appropriate crowd funding option for Session Buddy. It's possible something like a gofundme or indiegogo campaign could have been more successful, but I don't have any data to back that up.
Rob
PLEASE allow searching on the "query string" portion of the URL, not just the abbreviated URL. Sometimes the query portion is a critical differentiator. If it's a performance issue, make the option settable: how about a setting to specify how many characters to consider? e.g. I might care about query strings that are 150 characters long, but not ones that are 1000 characters.
hansifer
OK, I've included a setting to "Ignore URL parameters and fragment identifiers when searching", on by default.
Derek Clark
Awesome! I was going to say the same thing. The most relevant scenario that will compel me to keep this off is search result pages that include your keyword in the QS. Sometimes sites intentionally utilize their CMS's search result template to simulate category or tag pages (or any other page type intended to segment content in a way that corresponds to a taxonomy). The query term *should* be in the page title, but you never know.
Great job with this project... it's probably a top 5 must-have extension for me. I used to use it just for recovery, but I'm starting to recognize the power and convenience of saved sessions.
The UI and responsiveness touches are great polishes, too. New users will subconsciously trust the extension and engage it more, hopefully driving your donations/user rate. Just send out one email asking everyone for $1, $2, or $4 - with a giant PayPal button.
PS: paypal.me (URL)
Keep up the good work!
hansifer
Thanks Derek! I'm glad you like it.
Fernando
Ty bro, you and your extension is awesome, when we can synchronize the data online, it will be even better!
Bob
Ditto. It's been pretty painful having to manually duplicate sessions across computers every time I create or modify one. In the meantime, is there anything you can do to make that process a little less tedious?
hansifer
I agree 100%.
As far as facilitating the interim process, what did you have in mind?
Tracer
Hello Hansifer, thanks a lot for your wonderful extension.
Rather than spend a lot of your time/money budget on a full featured sync with your own server infrastructure and so on, have you considered giving users the ability to do manual syncs to a pre-determined directory, synced by a third party service (e.g. Dropbox, Syncthing, git...)? This way the user can choose, manage and encrypt their own sync solution independently from Session Buddy.
The user could set the filepath in the Settings panel (e.g. ~/Dropbox/appdata/SessionBuddy/db.json) and when they would launch this manual sync (via a button?), Session Buddy would check that the filepath is set, file exists, etc. and then check if new JSON data is only added or if some of it is edited/deleted. In the latter case a simple conflict resolution dialog could pop up with the option to either overwrite the current local data or overwrite the one in the sync folder. AnkiSRS has been doing this sort of conflict resolution forever (using sqlite) and it works quite well for the users IMHO. Maybe for each sync a database backup could be written to ~/Dropbox/appdata/SessionBuddy/db.json.bakYYYYMMDD in case the users misclick the conflict resolution dialog and needs to rollback.
hansifer
This has been considered and discussed quite a bit in the Session Buddy forum. Unfortunately this approach has several problems related to reliability and usability. Check the forum for more details.
Ed
All of those are nice.
But "sync" is the best gift you can give us. :)
hansifer
Yep agreed. That one requires a lot of bandwidth though, so without the necessary funding it will take some time.
Neoopus
Please just implant it to use google drive like many other extensions do, so you don''t have to worry about the bandwidth or security since it''s already supported by the API
hansifer
Oh I meant dev bandwidth, but to your point, Google Drive is a bad fit for synching Session Buddy data for a number of technical reasons. Check out related discussions in the Session Buddy forum.
Anon
Ohh i am so looking forward to this feature!
omar
Yeh, I really needed the hiding of non-matched tabs while searching
User since 2013
Thanks, I've been wanting to see this feature for a long time
Anon
Thank you
mahmoud
thank you
Denis
This is beautiful!
I'm really glad I decided to contribute to the project! ^^
MagicianPe
Excellent, Thank you for your great work