dan@danixd.com
+44 7837 501 537
My name is Dan O’Connell. I am an Interaction Design graduate and web enthusiast who loves designing immersive, creative & user-friendly interactions.
I hope to one day conquer the world with an Arduino board, a windmill and a modem, but in the mean time, I’ll stick to front end web design + development.
Twitter @daninacan
LinkedIn /danixd
Delicious /daninacan
Facebook /danixd
Spotify /danixd
10 Shiny Chrome Extensions
I have recently switched my main browser over from Firefox to Google Chrome and I must say I am rather pleased I did. Firefox just takes too long to initially load, at least on my over-the-hill machine.
One of the main reasons for me not wanting to disown Firefox was the number of plugins it offered. It made my life easier for both browsing and developing. This was all until I discovered Chrome not offers a faster loading time, faster page rendering, a bigger browsing window and -webkit- support, but it has extensions too! Most of the listed plugins are notifiers. I find these particularly useful because I can be working and still stay updated on my social media and email accounts, without having to go to each individual page to check.
The chrome extension library: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/?hl=en
Your browser’s extension menu: chrome://extensions/
Here are the plug-ins I use:
Chromed Bird
“Chromed Bird is a Twitter extension that allows you to follow your timelines and interact with your Twitter account.”
Chromed bird sits on the tool bar in the form of a little blue bird. When new tweets come through a number count appears and overlays the bird as it turns red. Direct messages make him turn green. Both make him both red and green. It has the exact same functionality as the Twitter home page, including the ability to search and letting you write Tweets, but it also includes a URL shortener (in the form of bit.ly), making your life much easier when it comes to keeping on top of tweets and tweeting something immediately after discovering it.
Chromepad
“A small extension that lets you to take quick notes and save them for later.”
Pretty self explanatory, a very simple drop down text box sitting in the navigation bar. Nice for wiring notes in. The beautiful thing about it is, it stores the message no matter how many times you close your browser, or crash. Surprisingly useful for temporarily storing things such as WordPress generated admin passwords.
Delicious Tools
“Quick access to saving Delicious bookmarks. Customizable keyboard shortcut. Selected text populates your notes field.”
Don’t you hate manually adding bookmarks on the Delicious home page? This extension offers a super simple interface for bookmarking the current page, as well as a link to your bookmarks and inbox.
Facebook Notifier
“Facebook Notifier – Created by David Zetterberg”
A Facebook logo sitting in your navigation bar, that has a number count for the amount of notifications you receive on the site. Saves you from checking your page every 15 minutes and getting distracted by the social Feed, without worrying you have missed something “important”.
Firebug Lite 1.3.0 beta
“Firebug Lite 1.3.0 beta for Google Chrome, supported by the Firebug Working Group.”
This was the straw that broke the fox’s back. Although only in Beta, this version of Firebug offers everything its Firefox counterpart does. Still supported by the Firebug group, this extension lets you inspect individual elements, view the page source, including CSS, Java and Domain details. Perfect for finding that missing closing <div> tag!
Google Mail Checker Plus
“Displays the number of unread messages in your Gmail and Google Apps inbox. Preview mail, read, delete, archive and mark as spam!”
Similar to the Facebook notifier, this extension sits in your toolbar and updates when you recieve an email. The plug-in enables you to quickly ‘mark as read’, reply and delete messages as well as acting as a link to your webmail.
Google Reader Notifier
“Displays the number of unread items in your Google Reader account. Clicking can show a preview popup or open your Reader account.”
A standard notifier, updating when your Google Reader account recieves RSS feeds. The preview popup does not work, but the plug-in lists the title and the source, which is all you really need.
Notifier for Google Wave
“Displays number of unread Waves.”
Again, the same as the other notifiers, sits in your tool bar and updates when you get a wave and gives a link to the appropriate content.
QR-Code Tag Extension
“Display a QR-Code tag for the current URL in the browser. The size of the generated QR-Code is adjustable.”
A really useful that creates a QR tag for the current page. The tag can be saved or shared to Facebook. Hopefully the usage of QR tags will increase in the UK.
RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)
“Adds one-click subscription to your toolbar.”
A plugin that creates the RSS logo in the right hand side of your address bar when you come accross a page with a feed. Lists every feed on that page and enables you to easily subscribe to each of them on your Google Reader account.