[resend, I think I screwed up the previous three tries] I wrote an extension that adds a page action to trigger Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
It's basically just a glorified bookmarklet. Code is here: http://neugierig.org/software/git/?url=chrome-readability/ Browse it here: http://neugierig.org/software/git/?url=chrome-readability/tree/ I can't provide a .crx because I wasn't able to figure out how to build one, which I think means I can't actually install it. :~( Here's some feedback on the process. I know extensions are still under development, and that surely most if not all of these are already known bugs, and that others are probably my fault for doing it on Linux. I thought it would still be helpful to give an overview of points of confusion I ran into, in case any of these aren't yet known bugs. - Weight. This feels like a *lot* of code (content script, page action, background page, manifest, message ports) just to make a bookmarklet appear in the URL bar. I wonder if there's a place for a "simple" extension API for bookmarklet-y sorts of things? - Making my page action show up. It wasn't clear to me how to make my action just always show up. I think I may have done it wrong: http://neugierig.org/software/git/?url=chrome-readability/tree/background.html since it feels unreliable (sometimes it doesn't show). - The failure modes are confusing. Sometimes it prints to the console (when I've made a typo in my manifest); other times it prints to the error console of the extension (bugs in my background js); other times it prints to the page's error console (bugs in my content script). Many of those times there's no obvious way to map the error back to the line that is failing. - JS console. Do we really have no UI to get to the JS console? I had to open the developer tools, then guess that one of the icons at the bottom of the window would show me the messages. - The docs around content scripts communicating with the embedding page aren't too clear. See e.g.: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/content_scripts.html#messaging That section is mostly just a big example but for example nowhere is the postMessage API described. I'd prefer it to be laid out more like: - how to make each endpoint listen for messages - how to make each endpoint send a message - Doc organization. It would've been clearer to me if there is one more level of nesting. Sections like toolstrips, page actions are features with manifest edits as well as APIs, while sections like tabs and windows are just API references. - Building the .crx. strace -fo log chromium-browser --user-data-dir=/home/martine/test --pack-extension=`pwd`/readext --pack-extension-key=chrome-readability.pem Doesn't show it ever trying to create my .pem. Maybe it's not implemented, but it'd be nice if it at least complained in that case. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Developers mailing list: [email protected] View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
