APID

APID was inspired from a workshop held during another hackathon this year: qwerhacks, where we all met! Although the topic of the workshop was not entirely tech-related, the speaker mentioned a passion project of hers - the Glance Back browser extension - which ended up blowing up and becoming very popular. The idea of creating a Chrome extension thus became the basis for our project idea. Additionally, we drew upon our own experiences within academia to determine the goal of APID - which is to help students be more accountable when it comes to their time. Often, we find ourselves sucked into scrolling endlessly on websites designed to hold our attention—perhaps excessively so. Although it’s difficult to completely curb such behavior, having a data-based representation of how much time we spend on websites we aim to avoid is the first step in doing so. This is what our extension aims to help accomplish.

Through these past couple days, we have all gotten to learn Javascript as we all had little to no prior experience with it. Of course, we also have gotten the chance to learn about browser extensions, the necessary components to create one, how to test it, and how to actually upload it to use in a chrome browser. A main component of this project also incorporated learning and using the Chrome APIs such as Chrome.tabs and Chrome.webNavigation. To build this project, we used both Visual Studio Code and GitHub.

Whilst building our project, there were three main obstacles. The first was actually using Javascript because, as mentioned before, all three of us were inexperienced with the language. Additionally, actually testing our code as a browser extension was difficult at first. This was because we didn’t know how to access the console inside the browser window, but that was an easy fix. Lastly, the bulk of our time at LA Hacks was spent on learning about the Chrome APIs and how all their individual events worked. This involved writing a lot of sample code just testing out the APIs and their functionalities.

Built With

• chrome.webnavigation
• css
• hmtl
• javascript