Apps – Page 2 – Converge

Chrome Extensions I use

Just thought I’d share the full list of Chrome apps and extensions I use. Favourites/recommendations are in bold.

Extensions

General / Productivity:

AcceleReader – My tool for target: Pocket zero – supports reading time tags, random reads, unread article count and more. Own extension.
autoConvert – Automattic currency & unit converter. Own extension.
BetterTweetDeck – Provides many small but usefull additions to Tweetdeck.
Blipshot – Quick, easy screenshots of full webpages including scroll-hidden portions.
Clutter Free – Prevents duplicate tabs. Own extension.
Done! – Quick-add extension for iDoneThis users. Own extension.
Gmelius for Inbox – Some handy improvements to Inbox, specially auto-signatures for all email IDs.
Google Cast – Chromecast extension.
Google Translate
LastPass – Password Manager.
Momentum – Replaced new tab page with a beautiful background, weather and quote
OmniDrive – Search files in Google Drive by typing in Omnibox (location bar)
Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides (by Google)
Pushbullet – Just get it.
RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)
Search by Image (by Google) – Right click on any image and search for it on Google.
Send to Kindle – Send webpages to Kindle.
The Great Suspender – Suspends unused tabs to reduce memory usage.
Todo.txt – Simple text-file compatible task management extension. Own extension.
Continue reading Chrome Extensions I use

How I read and respond to user feedback

After writing the previous post, I thought I’d share another script I use, this time to respond to user feedback for my Chrome apps.

All the feedback links in the apps, and the link on page that opens when they are uninstalled, direct to this form.

Chrome apps' feedback form — Chrome apps’ feedback form

The problem

On submission, the form adds a row to a spreadsheet with each of those input fields in a separate column. Google provides a notification option for whenever the form is submitted. However, the default email sent by Google is quite useless:

The default notification email requires a click-through to see the changes. This is sad enough on the desktop. On mobile, it’s completely useless – requiring me to open a big spreadsheet to see just one new row of data!

Continue reading How I read and respond to user feedback

New idea: minimalist blog editor app

Yet another Chrome¹ app idea:

A minimal, no-frills blogging app with markdown editing², inline tagging support³, and draft auto-sync⁴ to WordPress and Medium

I find WordPress‘ editor too cluttered (despite the distraction-free mode), and Medium‘s too fiddly-gimmicky. In fact, I write most of my posts these days in another Automattic product – Simplenote, and then copy it to my WordPress blogs, or Medium for final editing, formatting, etc.

My WordCounter Chrome app already supports Markdown Extra. Reusing that code, adding Medium & WordPress API support, and adding a #tag parser shouldn’t take long. The only question is do I care about it enough to prioritise it over all the other stuff that’s on the backlog?

For the last couple of months that I’ve had this idea, the answer has been no.

Continue reading New idea: minimalist blog editor app

AcceleReader – tagging, history chart & beta support

It’s been a good few days of updating all my Chrome projects with various upgrades, and bug fixes. Here’s a quick review of the updates to AcceleReader – one of the newest in my collection.

Update 1 – For the taggers

AcceleReader - Add tags from notification — AcceleReader – Add tags from notification

Add tags to articles from article-added notification when you add them to your Pocket list. The ‘Add Tags’ link in notification opens a pop-up to add tags to that article.

Continue reading AcceleReader – tagging, history chart & beta support

Facebook Android app – a UX minefield

I’m sorry. This is yet another post¹ on more UX/UI mess that keeps bothering me.

Starting with something I recently started using after 8+ years – Facebook. FB earned a reprieve from the tech press after its change of heart on native smartphone apps. But their Android app is still way below par for what is the primary user interface for vast proportion of their users.

Here are 2 bits that bugged me right away…

FB Issue #1 – In-post touch areas

Touch Targets - Facebook Mobile — Touch Targets – Facebook Mobile

Facebook states that stories/posts that are posted natively get shared more widely to the followers, compared to those posted as links. Yet, the mobile interface makes it practically impossible to click-through to read those very natively-posted long posts.
Continue reading Facebook Android app – a UX minefield

Introducing: Done – Chrome extension for iDoneThis

iDoneThis is a unique productivity tool that begins where normal productivity tools finish – after you complete a todo/task. The core idea is very simple – log your completed tasks in (as you go, or once daily), and then track, search, tag, discuss, share them as you want.

To log a task you can either email a specified email address with completed tasks (better: just reply to their daily emails), or go the iDoneThis website to log the tasks.

Users can be part of (and post dones to) multiple teams, say one for each project or department. Completed tasks can be #tagged for easy organisation, and team members can comment on and/or *like* each completed task.

Productivity hack: Close your email client!

The log-by-email option used to work for me till, as a productivity hack, I decided to keep my email client and Gmail tabs in a default closed state *all the time*.

The hack’s worked brilliantly! There’s no notifications, and no more quick-check-if-there’s-any-important-new-email only to spend 15 mins going through unimportant, but interesting ones. I open the email client now only when I want to send an email, or am taking a break so I have time to spare. No more interruptions!

The downside to this successful hack is that now I don’t want to open the email client, more recently the Inbox tab, or the iDoneThis website just to send a one line completed task email. And so, slowly, I stopped logging any dones at all.

The real deal: Done!

This new extension, Done!, is my solution to this problem – a way to quickly log completed tasks to iDoneThis without sending an email, or opening the website. Quick, simple, single-purposed.
Continue reading Introducing: Done – Chrome extension for iDoneThis

Displaying developer name in Chrome Web Store app listing

Chrome Web Store‘s developer attribution doesn’t seem to be very clearly documented anywhere. It took me a while to figure out how to display my name, instead of my domain name on my app listings. Seeing people ask about this in Chrome-apps mailing list, I thought I’d put the details out here for Google to index.

CWS¹ offers two kinds of owner attribution for app² listings:

by domain name, and
by developer’s chosen name

Here’s how to set them both up:

Continue reading Displaying developer name in Chrome Web Store app listing

Filter articles in Pocket by length & age

I’m happy to announce that the latest update of AcceleReader for Chrome brings article filtering to Pocket.

Articles may be filtered by age or length:

By length¹, articles can be filtered as Quick Reads (<4 mins), Medium (4-8 mins) and Long Reads (>8 mins)
By age², the articles can be filtered as Fresh (< 1 week), Ripe (1-2 weeks), Ageing (2-4 weeks), and Old (>4 weeks)

The filtering interface is brought up by:

clicking on the total time displayed on top left, or
by pressing the key ‘.’ (Period).

It can be dismissed in the same manner, or by clicking anywhere on the page.

After reading-time tags for mobile, this is the second big feature I’ve been enjoying using myself, and hope other users like it as well!

My Pocket list filtered by age (Fresh) and length (Long Reads)

My Pocket list filtered by age (Fresh) and length (Medium)

My Pocket list filtered to read something quickly.

Continue reading Filter articles in Pocket by length & age

App Splash Screens – The Good, the bad and the ugly

I’m not a fan of app splash screens. They delay app usage without presenting any useful, or even pleasant, information or interface. To me, they imply either:

badly thought out app design requiring loading loads of data before the UI can even be shown, or
a pathetic branding attempt that spoils UX by unnecessarily delaying app access

Here’s some thoughts on how to (not) do splash screens in apps:

The Ugly

My pet favourite object of splash screen hatred is the MyFitnessPal app. It has not one, but 2-step splash screen. The first one shows a progress bar, which I assume shows the status of data stored locally on my device.

Myfitnesspal - Splash screen stage 1 — MyFitnessPal – Splash screen stage 1

This is followed by another phase of splash screen madness under the Synchronising data title with a rotating symbol this time (so no indication of progress).

Myfitnesspal - Splash screen stage 2! — Myfitnesspal – Splash screen stage 2!

Only after the local data has been ‘loaded‘, and synchronised with the servers, is the user allowed to see the app UI. And despite this, the headline daily dairy numbers they show on landing screen is wrong most of the time. Specially if another app (Garmin Connect for me) has synced exercise calories with MyFitnessPal.

This feels so wrong. Why can’t they just show me the default landing page UI right away, letting me do what I do on most app uses – log food consumption – as quickly as possible. The changes can all be synced in the background.

The multiplicity of logos on the splash screen, as well as several other UI decisions in the app seem to convey that MyFitnessPal has a weak UI/X team being overridden frequently by a politically strong marketing/content team.

Continue reading App Splash Screens – The Good, the bad and the ugly

Clutter Free crossed 2000 WAUs

Clutter Free, my favourite Chrome project, crossed 2000 weekly active users today – a year and 17 days since the first alpha version was uploaded on to the Chrome web store.

It’s my favourite because of its minimalism –

single purpose (prevent duplicate tabs),
bare minimum UI (a browser button to switch it off/on),
a single background script that does all the work

The users seem to agree. It has the highest average rating of all my projects (excluding the recent AcceleReader for Pocket which has less than a 10th of the users), and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive (except the one that’s confusing me).

The growth so far has been all organic – an indicator that there’s a need for this functionality natively in Chrome, like in Firefox. And a bigger indicator of how lazy/miserly I have been about promoting it.

Here’s to the next 10x, hoping I can keep it simple and growing.