Kongregate Sidebar Firefox Extension

Hi All,

today @lunch I was annoyed once again by not being able to easily browse through the badges I still need to achieve. Not a big issue for normal people you would say, but for me it was enough to start developing a Firefox extension to make my life just that little bit more easy.

I think for me this extension currently does what I want, but I don’t think all of you will agree, and that’s the reason why I would like you all to have a look at it. Give me your suggestions, request other features, and help me test it a bit more.

I currently developed the user interface as a sidebar because the badges require quite some space (the image of a badge). But I did separate the “business” logic from the user interface, so if anyone has a better idea of how to display these badges, I should be able to quite easily implement it.

For now, the extension works as follows:

1. Install it using the link below, and restart Firefox…

2. You can toggle the sidebar on (like any other sidebar) in your View/Sidebar menu, or by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + K

3. On first use you will be asked to enter your Kongregate user name (I will add some options window to reset change this I think?)

4. Wait a bit for it to load, the Kongregate badges page is not the fastest page…

Questions and things I’m not sure of:

1. I currently support the following filter/sort modes for your badges, can you think of more? Unachieved by date/Unachieved by difficulty/All by date.

2. Would a different user interface, other then the sidebar, be preferable, and what would that be?

Anxiously awaiting your feedback.

Screenshot of the sidebar in action

Updates of the extension are now available on AMO

View the rest of my work on AMO or on my own Firefox extensions website

Cheers.

Martijn

Looks/Works awesome, but will I have to enter in my username everytime?

Edit: Only problem I find is it takes a long time to load. But thats not your fault.

Edit2: Sorry, I didn’t see I don’t need to enter my name in more then once, now I’ll finish reading the first post.

You should only need to enter your user name the first time, it will be saved in your Firefox preferences.

Does it work in Firefox 3 Beta 5? Will there be support for Firefox 3?

There are currently still some problems with Firefox 3, but these will all be fixed around lunch time tomorrow ;)

Does it work in Firefox 3 Beta 5? Will there be support for Firefox 3?

Yes, working on mine right now, except the pictures of the badges don’t appear… EDIT: Damn ninjas.

Captain, love the add-on for the most part, but it would be easier if there was a toolbar button to access the sidebar in addition to the keyboard shortcut.

Also, what I would like to see is a notification of a new badge or card, perhaps a bit like the Gmail Notifier extension does it (by popping out of the bottom right of the screen).

But all in all, this add-on has a lot of potential… I’m hoping you will continue developing this, as I could see it becoming a huge hit.

I would like to download this extension, but would it work on Mac versions of Firefox? (I do have 2.0.0.14)

Oh wow. This is an excellent Firefox extension and I’m looking forward to using it and it’s development. Thank you so much for sharing this with us CaptainCaveman, and for going through all the trouble to create it in the first place. Well done Sir! =D

Sweeeeeeeeeet. Once you set up Beta 5 support, since I’m too lazy to do it myself, I will install it.

If there’s anything you want me to do that requires minimal amounts of work, I’ll do it and try to help out. But nothing big, I have too much else going on.

Woah! It works! Pretty spiffy if I do say so myself. Nice job on this!

not bad, my images are elongated, showing a white band at the bottom, but other than that not bad, it also never seems to stop loading. Are you using the view all badges page or the limited badges page? I look forward to future additions.

This makes me want to convert my greasemonkey scripts into extensions now… lol

looks awesome.

can you add a points to next level?

high five! it takes forever to load though.

hallelujiah!!! dude now all we need is a chat sidebar and we wont have to visit kongregate and bother with those silly adverts >:D

Hey ento, if you want to chat without Kongregate itself, google Muspell. And Sothink.

Looks awesome. I am gonna download it when I get to home.

New update:

- Added a “Current Card’ display, will only show if you have not yet completed it, cause when you have, it’s not that interesting anymore IMO.

- Added a toolbar button to toggle the sidebar (add it through the View/Toolbars/Customize menu).

- Fixed some bugs in searching/filtering, filter is now remembered across browsing sessions.

- Tweaked the user interface a bit… Not sure yet how to make the user info look better, ideas?

- Removed automatic reloading, took too long and was not that useful.

- Tested on Firefox 3 beta 5.

@nerdrock101, “All” Firefox extensions also work on a Mac (and on Linux, and on a pda, and on…)

@William_Wilson, The images should now be fixed, but since I did not notice the problem in my 3 Firefox’s I’m not sure of it. If it is still there, could you mail me a screenshot? extensions[at]captaincaveman.nl

@Katsu, Since this information is not on the account page, it will take quite a bit more time to also load the “points for next level” info, so I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Would more people like to see this at the cost of 3-4 seconds?

I would like to see also the achieved badges… In different tab or the most bottom of the list.

If you click the “View” button, you can select what you want to see. One of the options there is “All by date” which will show you all the Kongregate badges. Or did you mean you would like a new filter that only shows the achieved badges?

This extension is awesome :D

But each time I click the sidebar’s close-button, my Firefox crashes :( (Firefox 2.0.0.11, Windows Vista)

@Ventero and others, working on that. Quite bizarre, in all the past 4 years that I’ve developed Firefox extensions, I never managed to create an actual crash of Firefox itself…

Very impressive!

I quite like it. Seeing as I have awesome horizontal resolution this fits snugly beside a game and the chat. Well done.

This makes me very happy. I appreciate your work. You are full of win.