Whomwah.com

So, last week I posted about releasing a BBC Now Next extension for Google Chrome. I updated it a few days later, adding the rest of the information received from the BBC Programmes upcoming feed.

So, before I’m finally done with this, I though I’d write about a final feature I added, Reminders. Download the extension here.

Highlighted are all the active reminders

Having Now, Next as well as Later (the next few shows upcoming) is great, but I thought it would be so much better if you could add a reminder on these upcoming shows and be notified when they are about to start. With Chrome’s extensions API you have access to the icon that activates your extension, so you can not only redraw or animate that, you can also set a label, much like Mac and iPhone apps that display a number representing unread email etc.

So my implementation works like this. When the Now Next window is open you will see that there is a little clock icon next to any upcoming shows. If you hover your mouse over this icon you will see a crafty bit of CSS using transforms that animates the clock to make it easier to see. Clicking on this starts the reminder timer. That’s it for setting the reminder. Oh and you can cancel any reminder by clicking on it again.

Once the timer/s are running you can then carry on using the browser as normal. The timers will just remain running whilst you have the your browser open. You can also click on the now next icon, to see any active timers running.

Ok, now the important bit. What happens when the timer ends. So what first happens is the extension icon will spin 5 times to hopefully catch your eye. After the spinning ends, the icon will then contain a label which tells you how many finished reminders. This number will remain until you click on the extension icon again.

See how many reminder have finished

Oh, and when you do click on the icon, you will see that the reminders that finished will be highlighted and pulsing.

These reminders have been mocked up hence their position

So, I hope you like this little addition, and I’d appreciate your feedback.

Now, although I wrote a lot of this on my daily commute, I was also given the chance to work on this whilst at work with the BBC R&D Prototyping team. I ran the idea past them a week or so ago at a standup, and said it would be great learning should we want to build anything else. They trusted me. This makes me happy.

Finally as I said in the previous post, you can download the source for this via my github account.

I know this extension to firefox has been around for ever, but I feel it deserves it’s own little big-up as I find it so useful. Developed by Chris Pederick, it is a toolbar extension for Firefox that allows you to use many great tools that the toolbar has built in. For example a useful one is the ablity to highlight all block level elements, also to view the CSS ID’s and Class information on the page and then edit that information live.

There really is too many features to list. Let’s just say if you are a web developer, you need it!