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Chrome Dial - 1.0

by vinkento
Extension meant for Developer Builds of Google Chrome 4.0+
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Chrome Dial provides keyboard shortcuts to your bookmark bar links and a “new tab page” replacement.

  • 1.0
  • GPL
  • vinkento
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  • 1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (24 votes, average: 3.04 out of 5)
  • 8263 times

More about this extension

Features:

Keyboard Shortcuts
(note: these shortcuts only work when a web-page is focused, they will not work from the address bar or from google’s built in pages – e.g. history, downloads, etc)
Alt + (1-9) : Redirects the current selected tab to one of the first 9 links on your bookmark bar.
Alt + Shift + (1-9) : Opens a new tab to one of the first 9 links on your bookmark bar.
Alt + ~ : Redirects to the Chrome Dial Home page.
Alt + Shift + ~ : Opens a new tab to the Chrome Dial Home page.
Ctrl + Q : Opens a new tab to the Chrome Dial Home page.
New Tab Page – Chrome Dial Home
On installation, Chrome Dial will begin replacing Chrome’s “New Tab Page” with it’s own. Currently it displays a 3 x 3 grid of your first 9 Bookmark Bar links, scrolling down will show another 3 x 3 grid of the next 9 links on your Bookmark Bar, and so on.
The keyboard shortcuts work on this page as well, but will navigate to the links displayed on the current page (if you’ve scrolled to another set of links, the shortcuts will go there)
At the bottom right of this page, the “COPY THIS URL” link contains the link for the Chrome Dial Home page, it is there so you can copy the url into your chrome home page, it saves time on startup, and if you middle click your home icon on your toolbar, it will save from the new tab button refresh.
If you like Chrome’s default new tab page, you can turn off the replacing feature at the bottom of the page.
This page also has a limited list of your “other boomarks” as well on the right.
Personalized Page Icons For the Home Page
If you wish to have personalized icons for your links on the home page:
The image must be a “.png”
The image must have the same name as the link (for example, if your bookmark bar link’s name is “GMail”, then your image’s name must be “GMail.png”
The image must be placed in Chrome Dial’s icons directory:
Drive:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Extensions\Default\Extensions\[Chrome Dial Extension ID]\1.0\icons
That’s a hand full I know… and I’ll probably fix that in the new releases, but for now, that’s what you get.

Reviews

  1. Nedialko says:
    October 28, 2009 at 9:54 am

    Looks promising but:
    1. There is only text for the bookmarks in the bookmark bar and no for the most visited sites as in the Chrome build in New Tab Page.
    2. No option anywhere or I just couldn’t find it. Ones I disable Chrome Dial new tab page there ware now way to bring it back.
    3. Bookmark folders are not working. When I click on a bookmark folder to expand it it try to open it as a page.

  2. Umang says:
    October 28, 2009 at 10:39 am

    Great add-on! I was looking for this ever since I hav estarted using Chrome.

    I don’t like your Chrome Dial Page and don’t use it.

    Also, please change the Alt + Num to open bookmarks in a new tab by default. Alt + Shift + Num is too much. Or provide a settings page to allow us to customize keyboard shortcuts.

    Why don’t your keyboard shortcuts work on Chrome’s New Tab Page? Very annoying. I wish you could find a way to make it work.

  3. Umang says:
    October 28, 2009 at 11:55 am

    After installing, middle-clicking any link switches directly to the new tab. Please fix this. (After disabling Chrome Dial, the original Chrome functionality is back).

  4. Polprav says:
    November 2, 2009 at 7:50 pm

    Hello from Russia!
    Can I quote a post “No teme” in your blog with the link to you?

  5. jazz7 says:
    November 16, 2009 at 7:42 pm

    sumthing i waz looking for.. but there is a problem .. there should be option to configure the sites which will appear on the new tab page..
    Use of bookmark bar is just not good..for example i use folders on my bookbark bars to act as live feeds(using rsslinks extension) n rest of the space for bookmarklets..now how do i use your extension
    perhaps you make a customisation page and use local storage to store the settings
    hope u implement my suggestion.. it’s a gr8 extension..should be developed further

  6. vinkento says:
    November 23, 2009 at 9:39 pm

    For those of you waiting on development, please be patient a little longer. The next version is in development. My hope is to have it out before Google releases its own extension gallery. Updates you can expect in the next release:

    Link customization (stored in local storage instead of the bookmark bar)
    Keyboard shortcut customization
    Homepage customization (including: grid size, icon size, colors, pictures, and more)
    The ability to automatically switch to new tabs created
    Cleaner interface

    In the long term, once Google updates the API, I’ll see about a full replacement of the new tab page to include things like “most frequent pages” and the like.

    I’m sorry that I will not be able to deliver keyboard shortcuts that work on chrome’s built-in pages like the default new tab page as of yet. Chrome’s API simply doesn’t allow it as I see it yet.

    Thanks for all the downloads and votes everyone.

  7. taftie12 says:
    November 25, 2009 at 4:10 pm

    First of all, I love the idea it has great potential. You sure do have some harsh critics. My only problem with it is that it doesn’t display pictures on the Chrome Dial new tab page. If this was implemented, I would use it no doubt. Great work so far and I’ll be anticipating your next release!

  8. QQFarmer says:
    December 1, 2009 at 2:37 pm

    Looks so promising. Please keep up the good work.

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