Cool Clock

An extension fully loaded with tons of useful time-related features.

This app was originally created as a simple clock displayed in a badge to test the new extension feature introduced back in Chrome 4. It has been growing since then. Initial release was on Dec 22, 2009.

Components

Components are what made up of most of the extension. Here's the list of components:

Component	Description
AlarmClock	Alarm clock
alarms	Handles system alarms
app	The extension
BadgeTextManager	Manages badge text display
BrowserActionHandler	Browser action handler
CountdownTimer	Countdown timer
Graphics	Graphics
HourlyTimeAnnouncementHandler	Handles hourly time announcements
KeepAwake	Manages wake lock for alarm clock and countdown timer, etc.
Localization	Localization
OmniboxHandler	Handles omnibox inputs
SectionUptimeManager	Section uptime manager (statistics)
SoundManager	Sound manager
Stopwatch	Stopwatch
TimeTZ	Custom time object with customizable timezones
WeatherHandler	Fetches weather information
WindowManager	Create windows and remember their positions

They are located under components/.

Dependencies

The extension depends on the following libraries:

• jQuery 2.2.4
• Bootstrap 3
• D3

Permissions Explanation

Permission	Explanation
notifications	Create hourly notifications and other notifications.
contextMenus	Create context menus.
tts	Text to speech.
*://calendar.google.com/*	Sync events from Google Calendar.
*://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/*	Sync events from Google Calendar.
clipboardWrite	Write time to clipboard.
activeTab	Write time to current focused text field.
alarms	Extension uses system alarms so the extension does not need to poll continously.
power	Acquire wake lock when there is an ongoing alarm or countdown.
idle	Fetch system's idle state in order to pause any updates during idle.

Todos and Issues

The extension originally was created for the purpose of sharpening my JavaScript skill and develop maintainable practices. Due to that reason, one of the major issues of the extension is that it contains a large amount of legacy code.

Issue 1 - Unorganized Files

Many old files are unorganized and all over the root directory. The end goal is to organize them into their corresponding component directory.

This is ongoing.

Issue 2 - Rewriting Codes Written More Than Half A Decade Ago

Old files contain many code smells and codes that are hard to maintain. The solution is to completely rewrite them as components. A major part of the extension has been rewritten into components. These still need to be created:

• NotificationManager

There are also files that should not be used but old codes depend on, such as tools.js. They should be removed once the files that depend on them are rewritten.

This is ongoing.

Issue 3 - Localization

Localization is a particularly difficult problem to solve. Before the adoption of the component structure, localization was achieved via the i18n function in translation.js. It let users to specify the language that they want to use (Chrome does not native support this), and dynamically fetch the language files synchronously such that it can be used as such:

var settings_str = i18n("settings");

AJAX calls should not be synchronous, however it did simply a lot of the code. It would be ideal if the extension can be rewritten in a way such that localized strings can be fetched synchronously. One possible solution would be to load all the strings into memory during extension initialization.

This is being considered.

Issue 4 - Unnecessary Features

There are some unnecessary features that I'm considering to remove in the future:

• Voice control

Issue 5 - Calendar

One of the feature that this extension has is a built-in calendar. The original idea is to support syncing events between Google Calendar and the extension. However I don't see how this can be useful in anyway and I'm considering removing it in the future.

Resources

Icons used in the extension:

• famfamfam Silk Icons
  Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
• Material Icons
  Licensed under Apache License Version 2.0.

Fonts used in the extension:

• Glyphicons from Bootstrap 3
• Roboto
• NotoSans
• Oswald
• Meteocons

Default ringtone:

• Sound Jay

Contributing

Feel free to contribute to the project by creating a pull request.

Adding/Updating Language Files

This is not one of my main concerns currently and should be not be done in this repository.