Quick access to your Chrome apps
Release of a version 2.0 of my little Chrome extension is a great opportunity to write about it, as I did not have a chance to do so on this blog yet. The story begins I believe 2 or 3 years ago, when Google decided to introduce Chrome apps. Along with that change they added shortcuts on the new Chrome tab to launch them. Some time after that, they changed their mind and moved away from the apps shortcuts visible on the new tab page. Apparently nobody was using it, so they introduced Apps page that shows exactly that thing we know from the past.
Well, I missed apps shortcuts on the new tab page, so I learned how to create a Chrome extension in hope to once again bend the world's state to my purpose. I thought why do I need to open a new tab to view my Chrome apps. Can I make a popup showing my apps? One that would mimic Google's solution with all the drag'n'drop reordering goodness, nice icons and fonts? Sure I can. Here's the Apps Launcher.
At first it was a little Angular.js application with a pinch of JQuery and a grid from Bootstrap. It was fast to develop, but resulted in a quite heavy build. It was working, but was a little to slow to open for a popup with circa 15 icons.
Time was passing, people were using it and installed it freaking 120k times, which is a huge success for me (for a project that's being developed in just my free time), so I decided to optimize it and rebuild it in vanilla JS and here it is. In version 2.0 the only client dependency is Sortable - a little, but great library for reordering items in lists and grids (without any dependencies!). As for transpilers Apps Launcher is using Babel and Sass. It's also loading much faster. When I measured it, it was 72ms, while the old one sometimes reached 1s or more.
It's always a great pleasure to create something, that works and makes your life easier and to learn something new along the way. I wrote it for myself, but I am really happy to see that there are people using it around the world. The source is on my GitHub and it's free to install from Chrome Webstore.