Most Wanted

It’s a funny feeling when you solve one of those personal pet peeve problems that you aren’t sure anyone else cares about, and then you find out that you’re not alone. That funny feeling becomes a fantastic feeling when you start realizing that there might actually be a lot of people who share(d) your frustration, and appreciate the unique qualities of your solution.

“Clever and simple”

— John Gruber @ Daring Fireball

Since launching The Magic Highlighter, we’ve been absolutely floored by the overwhelmingly positive response. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who were annoyed with the seemingly small set of problems that The Magic Highlighter solves.

“This is incredible! Instant buy.”¹

“AMAZING! This is exactly what I needed even though I had no idea I did!”²

“This is a perfect example of a simple idea, brilliantly executed — absolutely perfect.”³

“This is one of those seemingly simple things that fixes a fundamental problem for me and I will quickly not be able to live without.”⁴

And our absolute favorite: “Clever and simple.”.

We continue to be completely blown away by these reactions!

However, along with the rave reviews, we have also received a good amount of feedback that I would mostly characterize as friendly suggestions on how to make The Magic Highlighter even better. Some of those suggestions were requests to add support for additional search engines that we weren’t previously aware of such as Neeva, Brave Search, and Kagi ⁵, which prompted the first update to The Magic Highlighter.

Some of the suggestions were adjacent to improvements we had planned on implementing, but they didn’t quite make the cutoff for initial launch. These were packaged up into the second update to The Magic Highlighter.

Then came a steady stream of repeated requests from users as they began settling in with The Magic Highlighter as part of their daily workflow. Today’s release is the result of compiling this feedback and prioritizing the improvements that would address the most commonly received feedback.

On to the release notes!

Release Notes

Version 0.7.0

The third update to The Magic Highlighter is now available in the App Store, including the following improvements.

NEW

• [feedback#29] Added a toggle to disable magic highlights (#1 most wanted)
• [feedback#6] Added ⌘-Option-F keyboard shortcut to toggle magic highlights (#2 most wanted)
• [feedback#5] Added support for noise word filtering (#3 most wanted)
• [feedback#17] Added support for the Ecosia search engine (ecosia.org)
• [feedback#22] Added support for Google Ukraine (google.com.ua)
• [feedback#16] Added keyboard shortcuts 1—6 for selecting a highlight color
• [feedback#7] Added support for user-defined highlight colors
• [feedback#10] Added support for configuring the default highlight color
• Added an options page (beta) for modifying user configuration, including custom highlight colors and noise words.

CHANGED

• [feedback#20] The app icon on macOS now has rounded corners.
• The ⌘-Shift-F + A shortcut has been updated to ignore noise words, so it will only toggle “all” highlighted terms that don’t match the configured list of noise words.
• Highlight colors are now remembered on a per-website basis. Example: if you change the highlight color on a Wikipedia page, the next time you visit Wikipedia it will use the same highlight color. NOTE: highlight color selections are persisted in browser “localStorage”, which is not synchronized across devices, and which is subject to the limits of localStorage (i.e. may be deleted if a website is not visited for 7 days).