Chrome extensions
I’ve written my first Chrome extensions because I discovered that ColourLovers has an API. Both extensions are about palettes, either using them or creating them. Page Colourizer grabs a random palette or pattern and applies it haphazardly to the current page. Some of the results are pretty garish, but it’s entertaining. It’s a fun way to discover new ColourLovers palettes at least. The other extension, Colour Extractor, grabs up to five colors from the current page and lets you make a palette with them. It also shows information about each color it extracts, and if a color isn’t already named on ColourLovers, you can click it to go to the Create a Colour page and give it a name.
I’ve been using my coworkers and Jon as guinea pigs to get feedback. I’ve gotten lots of ideas about how to improve both of them, but I’d love to know your thoughts, too. My next big feature for Page Colourizer is to add the ability to save a palette for a site, then every time you load that site, the palette is applied. I also have some thoughts on how to speed up the extension. Currently, with Colour Frenzy mode, it waits until the page is fully loaded, then it downloads a random palette, then it goes through every element in the page and applies the palette’s colors. Since I’m using a background script anyway, I think I should grab a palette while the page is still loading and have it ready to go when the page finishes.
The source code for both extensions is available on Github under the GPLv3 license:
Both extensions are available in the Chrome Web Store: