I have made two AUR packages for Arch Linux and derivatives.

The package share-preview downloads the source and compiles with Rust (it takes quite a while to compile, and the compiled libraries take 2.5 GB space, like most other Rust apps :worried:. However they can be easily cleaned with the package manager. ).

That is why, I have also made the share-preview-bin package with the compiled binary (only a 2 MB download :smiley:, and 5.8 MB when installed ). I have uploaded the compiled binary to my fork.

I get a crash every time when I try to preview https://cockpit-project.org/ or one of its blog posts, such as https://cockpit-project.org/blog/cockpit-244.html

I'm not sure if something is just wildly wrong with what I'm doing on website or if I just happen to triggering an issue in Share Preview. (Either way, Share Preview shouldn't crash.)

And also: thanks for this app! It looks very useful. I'm looking forward to finally fixing https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-project.github.io/issues/224 (it's been on my TODO backburner for quite some time), thanks to Share Preview.

To short: We don't need to add ellipses for actions.

Ellipses useful when "if further input or confirmation is required from the user before the action can be carried out".

https://developer.gnome.org/hig/guidelines/writing-style.html

The app says “Card Error” when a page contains og: stuff but no twitter: stuff. Twitter falls back to opengraph when there’s no twitter card data on the page.

A share-preview.doap file is missing. Note that it has to have the same name/capitalization as the GitHub repository.

For the maintainer to appear in Apps for gnome it must be in the form

  <maintainer>
    <foaf:Person>
      <foaf:name>User Name</foaf:name>
      <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:[email protected]" />
      <gnome:userid>gnome-user-acc</gnome:userid>
      <foaf:account>
        <foaf:OnlineAccount>
            <foaf:accountServiceHomepage rdf:resource="https://github.com/"/>
            <foaf:accountName>user-github-acc</foaf:accountName>
        </foaf:OnlineAccount>
      </foaf:account>
    </foaf:Person>
  </maintainer>

The dark toggle button is currently inactive when in light mode, and active when in dark mode. That's a bit weird IMO, since the two views are semantically at the same level.

A potential alternative could be what Icon Library does, where the button doesn't stick but the icon changes between a filled and an outline sun.

We don't need an extra action to show help-overlay. It already managed by GTK.

Source: https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.Application.html#automatic-resources

I keep forgetting what this app is called, and searching for terms like “social” and “link” to find it. The term "social” appears in the appstream file, but not in the desktop file. The Comment and Keywords fields are used (in addition to the app's name) when performing a desktop search on GNOME.

The AppStream field is defined as follows:

A short summary on what this application does, roughly equivalent to the Comment field of the accompanying .desktop file of the application.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/sect-Metadata-Application.html#tag-dapp-summary

So it is reasonable (and in my experience quite common) to set the desktop file's comment to the same string. This also means that the same translations can be used in both places.

I have added the other terms that come to mind to the desktop file's keywords. "Unfurl" is the term that Slack uses. The others are, I hope, self-explanatory. At build time, the keywords from the .desktop file will be added to the repository (eg Flathub)'s appstream XML, so the app will be findable in GNOME Software with these terms as well.

(Personally I would remove the terms "GNOME" and "GTK" from the keywords.)

I don't know if there's a way to simulate this too, but it would be pretty nice to be able to preview what a link may look like when shared on a Discourse forum, because the way it previews tends to be very different from the rest of social media, and it has progressively become the most popular modern open source forum software (and that's what GNOME uses for its forums, like many other communities use nowadays).

If you copy some URL and, instead of using Ctrl+V, you paste it into the URL field by doing "Right-click -> Paste", the GtkTextEntry will be defocused, and when you hit Enter:

• If there was no existing preview, nothing will happen.
• If there was an existing preview, the "Details" (currently a spyglass icon thingy) button below the preview will be activated, opening the details instead of launching the query.

Totally a corner case, but I thought I'd report it anyway ;)

Social media sites' built-in share preview tools typically cache their opengraph previews, particularly images, but there usually is a button to force them to refresh / fetch the latest version. This is useful if you are actively working on improving the metadata on a website and are testing things with trial and error.

Would it be possible for this app to plug into those APIs to provide a Refresh button (when available)? If the refresh has a cooldown time limit for a particular site, the button could have a label (or GtkTooltip) that indicates that cooldown in real time while the button is in GTK "insensitive" status.

I think messenger previews would be a good addition to share-preview

Signal

WhatsApp (don't remember it always being so bland, tried with different links but all look the same)

There's a size limit for images which can be turned into Twitter cards, specifically 5 MB. There are probably similar limits elsewhere.

It would be handy to have some sort of warning if this is a problem.