Exportify 2024 Updates

Last time I made a series of updates the focus was mainly on the technical stack, bugs and robustness. This time I’ve put more effort into delivering all the features you’ve requested since then, plus some of my own! Hopefully you’ll find that these changes make Exportify a more useable and mature tool.

🌓 Dark mode

The new Color modes support in Bootstrap 5.3 made this much easier, so I thought, why not! I’m pretty pleased with the result:

🗺 Internationalization

This one was requested some years ago, and I admit at first I was hesitant because of how it might slow down development. In the end, though, I was curious about the implementation, so I decided to build it after all. At this point the feature set is pretty stable, so I hope that the benefit it brings to users will easily outweigh the impact on development time.

Home Lab SSD Encryption

Recently I rebuilt a home server which acts as a NAS for my personal data. I wanted to make sure the data would be secure in the event of the server being stolen, ideally with:

1. Reasonably secure encryption (targeted attacks will get the data one way or another)
2. Low performance overhead, since the machine isn’t high spec
3. The ability to be unlocked remotely in the event of a power outage

Solution

Once I started to consider different options, I was surprised to discover that not only are almost all modern SSDs actually “Self-Encrypting Drives” (SEDs) - meaning that they come with support for hardware full-disk encryption - but that this encryption is always active. From ArchWiki:

In fact, in drives featuring full-disk encryption, data is always encrypted with the data encryption key when stored to disk, even if there is no password set (e.g. a new drive). Manufacturers do this to make it easier for users who do not wish to enable the security features of the self-encrypting drive. These self-encrypting drives can be thought of as having a zero-length password by default that always transparently encrypts the data (similar to how passwordless SSH keys can provide somewhat secure access without user intervention).

Exportify Refresh

Way back in 2015 I released the first version of Exportify, a small web application for exporting / backing up Spotify playlists to CSV format for safekeeping (click here to go straight to the app if you’d like to try it).

It’s fair to say I’ve rather neglected this project over the past few years, so I decided to spend a good chunk of time this November on adding new features, fixing bugs and improving robustness, as well as a complete overhaul of the React dev stack.

Discovering MSW

Recently, as part of a development stack refresh for Exportify, I found myself digging around for the best approach to mocking HTTP requests in a JS test suite.

I needed something that would play nicely with Jest and React, allow me to mock requests at the transport layer so my tests could be de-coupled from the HTTP request library I chose to use, as well as of course providing a convenient DSL for writing the tests themselves.

GooglePlacesAutocomplete CocoaPod

GooglePlacesAutocomplete is a simple Google Places API autocompleting address entry view for iOS devices, written in Swift.

There are already a couple of solutions out there for this. GooglePlacesAutocomplete is different because it is 100% Swift, and aims to provide the simplest possible method of entering validated, autocompleted addresses.

It’s available as a CocoaPod - installation instructions here. Feedback and contributions welcome!

Screenshots