How do I Unclap on Medium ?
Well, you can always use official methods to unclap an article on different devices. But the way I unclap an article (on computer), is pretty cool. I use Unclap for Medium to bring back the old Medium’s unclap button to unclap 👏
Because, Un-Clapping an article should be as simple as a click
1. Idea
One fine day, I was reading an article on Medium and I accidentally clicked the “Clap” instead of the “Bookmark” button. Huh, no big deal we can easily undo it, right ? Well, not as simple as it sounds. I just hovered over the clap button to find the option to undo it, but there wasn’t any! I thought Medium no longer wants us to undo the clap. After a quick Google search, I found that they have now hidden that option all the way down where the article ends.
So it means that your effort to unclap is directly proportional to the length of the article. And that’s exactly what annoyed me. Medium must be having some reason to do so. But I didn’t like it at all. So, I decided to restore that old great unclap button which was this :
2. Making
The very first thing which I did is to decide the name- “Unclap for Medium”. The name of it is very clear. It does exactly what it says :) Now, I created the repository on BitBucket and finally started the coding part 💻. It was all going great until I discovered that Medium wasn’t that dumb to keep it so easy for me to make it. Medium uses dynamic element IDs to make it nearly impossible to simulate any action. And it becomes even worse when you have to simulate the click of a button which is basically an icon. Because for the elements having text, you can always take the reference of the text inside it and simulate the action, but what could I do to take the reference of an icon! The icon button (or the menu button which you saw all the way down the article) doesn’t have a fixed ID, text, class or anything which I can take the reference of 😠. I gave up at this very moment and went to sleep that night 🛌.
The very next day, while having the shower, the miracle happened. And now I knew how I had to target that icon button. Medium is using SVGs for all of its icons. An SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), has lines of rules which the computer understands and generates that image in whatever resolution anyone wants, without letting the icon or the image pixelate. Since the lines of rule can’t be dynamic I used it to take the reference of the icons wherever needed. And finally, the extension was ready to use 🎉
3. Publish
Without wasting any further time, I got my Chrome Webstore developer account set up and published the extension. It took one week for the approval of the extension from Google. Once the extension was approved, I finally shared it wherever I can.
And that’s it!
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