Thursday 14 April 2011

Reset buttons - useful or not?

I've seen quite a few blogs posts lately complaining about the HTML Reset button. You know, the one that often sits beside the "Submit" button. I think everyone must have accidentally hit Reset at least once. So what's the use of it? Personally I have never seen a web form where a Reset button is necessary. And I have accidentally hit Reset many times - especially when it's placed in the position you normally find the Submit button.

This afternoon I wrote up a quick Google Chrome extension to hide all Reset buttons. Are you sick of accidentally clicking the wrong button? Try out the extension and let me know what you think.

Thursday 7 April 2011

Google AdMob Earnings Checker (Chrome Extension)

Earlier this week I wrote up my first Chrome extension - the AdMob Earnings Checker. It's really easy to build extensions for Chrome - basically just stick a bunch of HTML and Javascript in a zipped folder, upload it and you're done. It took me less than an hour to build this guy (taking reference from a similar extension for AdSense).

The hardest part was actually decoding the AdMob page with the JQuery parser - take a look at the source of your AdMob sites page and you'll see what I mean. Not valid HTML by any means. I had to manually strip some tags in order to get JQuery to accept it as pseudo-html. Once I got over that difficulty though, it was pretty straight forward.

So if you develop Android apps, or operate any kind of mobile website using Google's advertising services, you might like to check out the extension. Any feedback would be appreciated!