Chrome Extensions

As Xpages is heavily presented using JavaScript, we discovered  that the fastest browser was Google Chrome.  In this article I highlight some of the Extensions that I use to help me with my day to day work with developing web applications and to navigate the web.

The first five are very useful for working on the web. 

Web Developer - Adds a toolbar button with various web developer tools. The official port of the Web Developer extension for Firefox.

If you have used firefox, then this is a direct port from FF to Chrome of their extension.  It allows you to see various elements, style sheets and has other tools to see images, resize  the screen etc...  I only installed this yesterday when looking into the Richtext issues between 8.5.1. and 8.5.2, but it proved to be quite useful.

Webpage Screen shot - Fast&Simple solution to Save & Share & Print & Edit screenshots of any webpage. Capture to PNG/JPG drawing tools, and sharing features.

This is quite useful for helping with user instructions.  You take a screen shot and you can draw and write over the top of them.  These can then be saves a jpg, or directly emails/printed.

bit.ly | a simple URL shortener - Version: 1.2.1.9

Shorten, share, and track your links, right from your browser, instantly

I use this to allow me to post shortened URLs in blog posts and in Twitter/Facebook.   

Bookmark tree to use with Google Bookmarks™ - Provides convenient access to Google Bookmarks™.

I use google to store all of my bookmarks, which means that they are available at any computer.  Each bookmark can be categorised and you can see the categories on the left and the links to the right hand side. 

SearchPreview for Google - Adds preview images (thumbnails) to your Google search results

This is just a nice to have.  It adds a small screen shot to the left hand side of the google search pane. 

SmoothScroll - Scrolls the websites smoothly when scrolling with the mouse wheel or the keyboard

This is another nice-to-have, but it seems to make the user experience smooth

These two below are more of a personal choice, as I use google extensively and twitter/Facebook. 

Google Docs Viewer (by Google) - List, view, search, rename, delete, and create new documents in Google Docs.

This gives me a direct list of my documents and allows me to create a document from any web page.  This is a useful tool that speeds up my note taking.

TweetDeck - Your personal browser for staying in touch with what's happening now

This allows me to combine twitter and Facebook in a single place.  I see the entries from both apps in a time line and can add/reply to either or both.  The great thing is that this works through our proxy.

You may use them, you may not, but I thought I would highlight the ones that I use.  If anyone uses FF or other Chrome Extensions.... please share.