The Developer’s Desktop

I’ve released the last of my planned Chrome Extensions today (I had dubbed the project The Chrome Swan). It is called The Developer’s Desktop or Devdesk, for short. It is a productivity extension built for designers, developers, programmers and geeks.

The extension is finally available on the Google Chrome App Store. You can find it here: Developer’s Desktop.

What the extension essentially does is bring you the latest news and the best webcomics to your Chrome homepage. This way, every time you open a new tab, you will be treated to one of Randall Munroe’s best xkcd comics as well as the hottest updates from Hacker News. Also, there are links to other websites such as Mashable, The Verge, Slashdot and Tech Crunch.

In addition to keeping you up to date with the geek world and providing you sufficient dosages of geek puns and romance, the extension also has multiple utilities built into it. It features a to-do list that allows you to add, check off and delete tasks throughout the course of the day. The search bar lets you search the open sourced engine, DuckDuckGo. This way, you can search for something without falling prey to Google’s Tracking mechanism.
The QOTD feature brings you an inspiring quote every day to offer you a fresh perspective of life.

The app also brings you a list of your most visited sites upon request. This ensures that you do not miss out on the latest updates from your favorite sites. There is a Bookmarks link too which brings you a list of your most recent bookmarks.

Finally, Developer’s Desktop also acts as repository of links for some of the most useful websites and apps on the Internet. These links are categorized based on their utilities so you’ll know where to go for a particular problem or task.

This project, like the previous two, is open sourced. In addition to accepting pull requests involving code, I am also open to any kind of design revamp suggested to me.
You can find out more about this in the documentation here: Devdesk Documentation

The CSS Helper Extension

 

CSS Helper is the second in a series of three extensions that I plan on launching this week. I built this extension when a designer friend of mine asked me for a tool that would allow him to look up CSS Properties of various elements on a website without having to open up the console.

Building the CSS Helper wasn’t much of a hassle. All I required was a dose of jQuery and the open sourced qtip2 to build a lightweight app that alleviated all console woes. Using the extension is pretty simple: While on a tab, click on the Extension icon to enable the qtip. Click again to disable.

Unlike the other two projects, I do not intend on extending the functionality of the CSS Helper. I think it is good to go as is.

Introducing Webchromic

 

Back in December 2014, I was doing an online course titled ‘Introduction to Computer Science’ offered by Harvard on the edX platform and taught by Professor David Malan. I remember that in one segment, where he was teaching elementary concepts of Linux, he showed us a comic that humorously illustrated what the command sudo did.

This entire incident may seem extremely trivial but it introduced me to xkcd and the world of webcomics. And since then, I’ve been hooked. It has become routine to start off my day by visiting my favorite sites to check if there are any new comics posted. And this got me thinking. Why couldn’t there be an extension that brought me all the comics I ever wanted to read to my homepage?

I tried searching for something similar on the Web Store first. I couldn’t find anything even remotely similar to what I had in mind. So, I went ahead and built one. The result was Webchromic.

Webchromic is a lightweight Google Chrome Extension that brings the best of the webcomic world to your Chrome homepage. Every time you open a new tab, the extension randomly loads the latest comic from its list of parsed sites. This list currently includes the likes of xkcd, Sarah’s Scribbles, SMBC, Pearls before Swine, Cyanide and Happiness among many others.

I published the extension today and made it public. It is available here: Webchromic- Google Chrome Store.

I understand that my taste of comics may differ widely from other people. As a result, I have open sourced the entire code on Github (You can find it here: Webchromic- Rounak Banik). I’ve also included explicit instructions in the documentation that would allow even the uninitiated to modify the extension and add their own favorite comics.

That said, if there is a comic that you’d like me to add to the official app, please feel free to ping me here or send me a mail to rounakbanik@gmail.com. Reports of any bug found and suggestions for new features are always welcome. I hope at least some of you here find utility installing and using this app.

Here are a few more screenshots of the app:

Web and Everyday Design

 

Browser, business, cms, computer, css, usability, design, designer, domain, ebusiness, engine, entwerfen, firma, forum, link, homepage, hosting, html, internet, it, kommunikation, open source, layout, media, network, online, optimierung, optimization, footer, Header, search, seo, software, suchmaschine, suchmaschinen, technologie, titel, web, webdesign, webhosting, webmaster, webseite, website, world, wide, web, wort, www, xhtml

As web developers who usually spent most of our time writing code at the back-end, we often overlook the importance of design. It simply doesn’t seem that important or difficult. It is the residual work left to the ‘artists’. There is a bias against designers in the world of web development akin to the greater favor engineering enjoys at the expense of art.

But the fact remains that good design is imperative to the success of any website, or any thing for that matter. As engineers, we may be able to build anything that is within the realm of our capability. But is the designers that determine what our users, our customers actually need. There is no point in building something that consumers cannot use or do not have a need for.

Personally, I feel that every web developer must have an elementary understanding of design principles. This would enable the designers and developers to work seamlessly on any project. There would also be increased mutual respect between the two groups.

So, with the above points in mind, I signed up for this course on Udacity titled Product Design (Incidentally, I learned approximately around that time that Evan Spiegel had built a prototype for Snapchat as a final project for his Project Design class). As is with most courses on Udacity, it didn’t disappoint me. It was definitely worth the time. I completed a third of the course before deciding that books were quicker and more efficient way to learn design.

I looked into the GoodReads of a friend of mine and decided to go through a couple of books she had rated highly. The first of them was this book called Don’t Make Me Think by a certain Steve Krug. It highlighted the principles that had to be kept in mind when building websites. I maybe stating this out of a hindsight bias but I felt that the things mentioned in the book were stuff I already knew. In other words, though the book had its share of wisdom, the amount of material absorbed was not in proportion to the size of the book (and it was a small book).

The second book though was amazing. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (He also offers a course of the same name on Udacity) was exceptional in the material it provided. Honestly, I will not be able to look at the world in the same way again. Norman makes us question the design of everything, from doors to airplanes. This wasn’t a book on web design but its principles applied to every product in every fathomable field. I seriously recommend this book to everyone who wants to gain basic understanding how people and products work.

As is evident, I haven’t dived that deep into Design. I do have a basic understanding and appreciation of the field though. Good developers are easy to find these days. Almost every engineering student is into coding. Good designers, however, is a different story. I am extremely fortunate to know some really good designers on campus though. Keep good developers close to you and good designers closer.