May Development Update

We wanted to highlight a few updates from Text Blaze development in May:

:white_check_mark: New Form Validation with {error}

Text Blaze has a powerful set of form commands that can be used to add structured input to your snippets.

In May we added support for validating the contents of these forms before snippet insertion. Using the new {error} command you can:

  • Make form fields required before insertion
  • Check the form field contents match a pattern (e.g. the entered text is a phone number or email address)
  • Ensure other business conditions are met before allowing a form to be submitted

This example illustrates the use of the new {error} command:

Name: {formtext: name=name}
Email: {formtext: name=email}

{if: name == "" or email == ""}{error: You must specify both a name and email; block=yes}{endif}
{if: email <> "" and not testregex(email, "^.+@.+\..+$")}{error: "{=email}" is not a valid email address; block=yes}{endif}

:two_hearts: Improved Web Compatibility

Text Blaze can be used on any website. That means it has to work with an incredibly diverse set of technologies as there are a huge number of ways to build websites. Today, we wanted to highlight two issues we addressed in May to increase compatibility.

  • The first issue showed up on our radar screen when a user flagged that Text Blaze was not running on the Superhuman website. Superhuman is an exciting new email application. Unfortunately, it loads pages in a way that resulted in Text Blaze never becoming active on it.

  • The second issue was flagged by a user who found that the keyboard shortcut to activate the CC field in Gmail wasn't working in Text Blaze. He was trying to use the {key} command to focus the field, but it didn't seem to work.

After some in-depth research, we were able to develop solutions to both these issues.

Even more important though, our compatibility philosophy is that Text Blaze should work everywhere without a single line of code in Text Blaze that is for to a specific website. So there is not one if domain = "superhuman.com" or if domain = "gmail.com" in our codebase.

This means that when we fixed the two issues highlighted here, we also fixed any other website that used the same type of page loading Superhuman did, or the same type of keyboard shortcuts Gmail does. That's how we're able to deliver the broad compatibility that Text Blaze provides!

As Always...

We hope you found this update interesting!

If you have any questions feel free to post to our Question and Answer community forums. If you have anything you would love to see in Text Blaze, please suggest it in the Features Idea section.

Good stuff. TB keeps getting better and better. I've just had a massive campaign for the 10th anniversary of a client, with tons of announcements for various contests, results etc. I can't even begin to calculate how much time and energy (especially since I didn't need to worry about mistakes) this little extension has saved me.

1 Like

Excellent update, thanks! Keep up the great work!