Hey everyone!

For last couple of weeks (well, ~3 months), we’ve been very busy with our own life, and therefore we haven’t released any update to CatBlock. We would like to apologize for that!

Fortunately, it’s about to change!

A few months ago, we got an email from someone called James. He told us he’d been planning something called the Citizen Advertising Takeover Service (or C.A.T.S. for short) and he thought we’d be interested in helping them out.

But first, lets explain what C.A.T.S. is.

Every day, when you’re commuting to work/school, you see ads. When you’re watching TV, you’ll often see ads. All these ads are doing is getting you to buy whatever product it is they’re showing you, often by making you think that you’d be happier with it.

We’ve released CatBlock for Edge version 1.4.1! You can download it from this page.

This fixes a few bugs with the original version we released, including:

• Added context menu options (Pause/Unpause CatBlock; Options page)
• Move from extension.getURL to runtime.getURL API

Wow. We weren’t expecting such an overwhelming response to our announcement. We didn’t even know that there was even anyone keeping an eye on us at all.

As there’s really only two of us most of the time, with busy lives outside of this, our hobby, work on CatBlock has always been a little slow. With yesterday’s announcement post, we were suddenly confronted with loads of news articles showing up with a simple search for “CatBlock”, where previously it just showed news about the AdBlock April Fools’ joke in 2012 that started it all off.

Hey!

Today I’m happy to announce that after much waiting on our side for the preview builds of Windows 10, we’re ready for Microsoft Edge.

When CatBlock first launches on Edge, it will be in a beta stage, whilst we iron out some bugs. However, we will be able to use the same code that we already use on Chrome and Opera, which reduces headaches for everyone!

Hello!

We are so pleased to announce the next version of CatBlock is finally out! We’ve reworked the ad replacement code to show you more cats, and it even works on YouTube!

In other news, CatBlock 1.3 updates the AdBlock core to version 2.50, bringing with it the latest features and fixes from the AdBlock team, and there’s a checkbox on the options page to let you turn off the ad replacement, letting you go back to just regular AdBlock, for when you’ve got that presentation you’re making and don’t want cats taking over the projector.

Our old site, based around this blog, has been completely updated and redesigned thanks to our lead developer Tomáš. It now loads faster and doesn’t crash as much! We’ll be adjusting the blog to be even more awesome than before!

Hi!

We’ve just released the latest version of CatBlock - version 1.2! This brings with it the following improvements:

• Translations for the CatBlock options page are available in some languages. If your language is not yet translated, join our translator team!
• The new design that AdBlock has had since 2.18
• The AdBlock "Thumbs up" icon for whitelisted pages has been replaced with a betr "paws up" icon.

Ever since we published CatBlock 1.1, our first working version, we've been working our socks off to bring you an update, where CatBlock looks much better, and has all the features of newer AdBlock versions. CatBlock 1.2 is based on AdBlock 2.14, and therefore has the new design that we've all become accustomed to. There's even the YouTube channel whitelisting feature, for those that want it.

Other things we've added to this coming update:

• Translations for the CatBlock options page for Slovak, French, Dutch and Russian have been added, so you can understand CatBlock better. (want to help translate CatBlock's options into your language? See this page for instructions)

We've just launched some new social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

We'll be using these pages, in addition to this blog, to share updates on CatBlock's development.

Check us out on @CatBlockTeam on Twitter and CatBlock on Facebook.

We have recently completed work on CatBlock 1.1.1

The versions for Opera and Chrome are currently pending review.

The changes in this version are:

• Fixes for Chrome Web Store and Opera extensions gallery.

Since I last posted, we have had translations made for the following languages:

• Dutch (Jérémy)
• French (Kilian)
• Russian (Defolter)
• Slovak (Tomáš)

Thanks so much to our translators! If you want to see CatBlock translated into your language when we release version 1.1.1, please take a look at our Translators guide

We've recently added translations to the CatBlock code. It is set to be released in CatBlock v1.2

If you want to help out with translating CatBlock ready for the release, see our instructions page - we'll be glad to set your account up!

Just a quick update...

We have changed the address for the website! We are now at https://getcatblock.com instead of https://catblock.sourceforge.net

Our support site is also located at https://catblock.tenderapp.com

Hopefully the changes we have made allow the site to load faster than it did at SourceForge.

We have recently updated our homepage with a new style. If you click the "Download Now" link, you will be directed to the correct download page for your browser. At the moment, we are unable to offer download links for Chrome or Opera, but we are working on publishing those to their relevant stores.

Right now, we have not yet started working on CatBlock for Firefox, and it seems that, as the AdBlock Firefox extension is quite new, many changes will be made before the code is as stable as on Chrome, as they work on a different codebase, as Firefox extensions are substantially different to Chrome ones, and we would have to work with updates to that as well.

Hello world!

As of today, the CatBlock blog is live at this website!

The website will be used for announcing news about the extension and release updates on how development is going.

Thanks for your support

Kieran (CatBlock admin)