i have just finished writing my first google chrome extension. took my half a day overall, few of hours here and there, but compared to firefox the red-tape stuff was much easier.

actually it is very simple, you make a new direcotry, and create ‘manifest.json’ description file, it includes all of the extension official stuff, like name, version, description and permissions. it also include pointers to other files – html and javascripts.

that’s it, from here it is plain web: html/css and javascript.

one thing worth mentioning is that if you change the manifest file you need to explicitly reload your extension on your chrome://extensions/ page, otherwise things like permissions are not updated. other stuff like html/javascript files are reloaded each time you invoke your extension, so no need to do nothing on this case.

what i was working on? well, long time ago i have found out that the old school method of cataloging things and then searching them by their location is not very effective, you pay a lot of time on the WRITE side and you pay as well on the READ side, using metaphor from the database world.

the search capability of everything and sublime text projects are far better, just see all the database as one flat list and start filtering it by your search term. so that what i did on my bookmarks, and here is the result:

everymark – ‘everything’ search on my bookmark.

when clicking the icon, a nice popup will appear, populated with a list of all your bookmarks and their links, whenever you start typing search terms the list will shrink to contain only the relevant bookmarks – neat – any way enjoy.

btw, for references about writing the extension i have use the following pages:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/devguide.html
http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/api_index.html
http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tut_debugging.html

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