On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Erik Kay <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> +kathyw (since you have some doc feedback)
>
> On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Evan Martin <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > [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.  :~(
>
> Packaging isn't implemented on Linux yet, so this will cause you some
> problems.
>
> You have two (non-Windows) options in the meantime.    The first is
> that you can use the gallery to package it (not an option for
> nn-Googlers yet, sorry).  The second is that you can use a ruby script
> that was posted on this mailing list a while back.
>
> Of course the other option is to help port the public key crypto code
> that's missing here.
>
>
> > 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.
>
> Thanks for taking the time and for writing the feedback.
>
>
> > - 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?
>
> Sure.  We've talked about this a bit.  Perhaps we could have a way of
> packaging bookmarklets directly.  Aside from autoupdate though,
> conceptually it would just be a bookmarklet (maybe with the ability to
> be in the omnibox).  Do you think there's anything else you'd want?
>
>
> > - 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).
>
> I'll leave this to Finnur to answer.
>

Might be http://crbug.com/21324, fixed on trunk.


>
>
> > - 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.
>
> Agree with you here.    In particular, the way we handle manifest
> errors is not easy.
>
> I'm not sure what we can do about different errors from the different
> pieces.  Did you find chrome://extensions?  It has a list of all of
> your pages and a button that let's you open the web inspector for each
> one (although not content scripts).


> > - 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.
>
> Agree that this could be better.  Maybe someone from devtools could
> talk to this.  Personally, I'd like it if opening up the devtools
> showed the console by default.
>

Yes yes yes. It was more than a little annoying to have to click three times
every time I reloaded my extension-in-development (reload, open inspector,
open JS console).

- Pam



>
>  > - 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.
>
> I think the current intent is to make the pages like toolstrip a bit
> richer rather than making more of a split between API reference and
> concepts.  We'd like the overall thing to be more approachable and
> less dense.  It's possible we'll just break down and do a more
> traditional concepts/reference split, but at the moment, we'd like to
> avoid that.
>
>
> > - 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.
>
> yeah, sorry.  As I said, this doesn't exist on linux yet.
>
> Erik
>
> >
> > >
> >
>
> >
>

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