Gerald is a duck who you can hire to manage your web browsing needs. Gerald is very talkative and is willing to work for free as long as you keep him company.
- Download the
gerald.zipfrom releases - Extract the zip file
- Navigate to
chrome://extensions - Enable developer mode
- Click on
Load unpackedin the top left corner - Select the extracted folder
- Open a new tab
Gerald was created for LyonHacks 3 with the theme 'productivity'. It is a chrome web extension which overrides the default new tab page with a productive set of tools for everyday web browsing.
We were inspired by Untitled Goose Game and ducks all across the world. We wanted to make an extension which built upon the features of leading web browsers in order to be more productive. That was when we noticed that traditional browsers were missing one thing: a duck named Gerald.
Gerald is a chrome web extension that provides a simple and clean UI to replace the boring new tab screen that Chrome has to offer. Gerald allows you to list your tasks for the day, save your favorite web pages, search the web, tell the time, and check the weather. Gerald also provides inspirational quotes, if you ask him kindly.
This project was developed using Vue.js and Typescript with TailwindCSS. As well as IntelliJ IDEA and VS Code, our favourite IDEs that never presented any sort of issues whatsoever. We initially built off of one of Google’s extension templates, however we ended up expanding it extensively.
We had many issues with configuring the web extension to support the features we wanted. Chrome is very precise about loading external scripts and apis, and so including this functionality took several deep dives into the depths of the Chrome developer's documentation. We also had some problems configuring our IDEs to support the diverse combination of technologies which were all being used in unison.
Gerald.
We've learned a ton about Chrome Extensions, JavaScript, and querying APIs. In the future, creating a similar extension will be immensely easier, as we now have the configuration and workflow defined for web extension development.
We would have liked to include integration with Google Calendar to present upcoming events and information right from the home page, which is definitely something we could expand to include in the future.