Thank you to everyone who read my article! Absolutely love some of the discussions going on here. My goal with the article was to peel away one layer of this abstraction and encourage curiosity in engineers who usually don't think about lower level stuff.
I have been working on an interesting low-code feature for the past two months in my open-source project - Diode. It's a visual way of building API endpoints without having to write a lot of code.
As it's not something I've built before, it was a challenge to design and build this feature from scratch. I had a lot of fun learning and building this, and would love to get some feedback from the community :)
Thanks! Yes, size is a priority to me, most of the extensions I have seen that come close have a large size and also aren't very performant in terms of the feedback and response times.
Thanks for the feedback.
Yes, the scrolling animation UX is not very good in some situations, but I really wanted to try something like this as I had never built one before. I'll add a more accessible static version of the web page that users can toggle to if they find the scrolling one uncomfortable.
I agree that the documentation is almost non existent at this point, but would work on adding it in the coming weeks.
The plan is to bring common browser actions and make them more accessible via the keyboard. The features present right now definitely have room for improvement, some of which are being discussed on the GitHub repo.
The newly added Chrome tab search widget definitely makes it easier to search and switch tabs, but it is still very much limited to just active tabs.
UnTab can search through tabs, history, bookmarks (as long as permission is given), and can also help in performing common browser actions quickly without leaving the keyboard.
Along with this, the Plugins API that I'm building for UnTab is fairly powerful at this stage and would allow the community to add other useful actions and tools to the extension that I couldn't think of on my own.
Yes, I am trying to reduce the requested permissions to the point where the user allows the necessary permissions for some feature of UnTab to run if they need it.
"can read and modify data on all pages" particularly cannot be removed as that is what allows UnTab search interface to show up on the pages.
network communication is again mainly for showing instant answers from DuckDuckGo searches which can be enabled if user needs it.
Will keep an eye out on other permissions if they can be minimized.
UnTab is a browser extension to search through open tabs, history, bookmarks and perform common browser actions in just a few keystrokes.
I started working on UnTab as a project for FOSS Hack 2020, to solve my personal problem of searching through dozens of open tabs in my browser. Since then, I have found other use cases that integrate well with the workflow of UnTab, like searching history, doing quick web searches, etc
I have open-sourced this project so that anyone can contribute plugins and themes that can extend the feature-set of UnTab. I had a great learning experience building this product and really hope it is helpful to the community.
Feel free to leave any feedback.
PS: UnTab was one of the winning projects in the hackathon!
Thank you to everyone who read my article! Absolutely love some of the discussions going on here. My goal with the article was to peel away one layer of this abstraction and encourage curiosity in engineers who usually don't think about lower level stuff.