Summary

Tabz is a Google Chrome extension built at HackNY Spring 2014 with Andrew. It is a tab manager to help you when you have a ridiculous number of open tabs. As it was my first my first successful hack, I figure it just that I make it my first project post as well.

Pitch

Do you suffer from too many open tabs? Tabz is the solution! This is a chrome extension to help manage all your open tabs. It provides users a popup window with all the open tabs in an easy to read manner. The tabs are organized in the window in alphabetical order and categorized by the domain. You can then just click on the name of the page to change your current tab. You can also close a specific tab or all duplicate open tabs.

Tabz has 5 stars on the Chrome Store!

Takeaway

The Tabz Project was my first attempt at a chrome extension–or any browser extension for that matter. The biggest concept I learned from creating it was the that of asynchronous versus synchronous computing. We had briefly covered the topic in lecture, but we did not have any assignments dealing with it. Since calls to the Chrome browser/library were mostly asynchronous, it was interesting seeing the unexpected behavior that would result from treating asynchronous calls as synchronous ones: loops being the strangest.

While the project has not amounted to all that much (yet?), we accomplished the basic goal of a tab management browser extension. Neither Andrew nor I are designers, which is one area in which the project is definitely lacking. Maybe one of these days I will beautify it (probably not though, because I am still terrible at design).

Future Developement

Andrew was working to add a feature to save tab sessions (Dec. 2014), but I have not had a chance to look at it since. I have no immediate plans to continue working on Tabz.