Kynetx’s New Sandboxed Browser Extensions

I recently released my “Old School Retweet” Kynetx app in the Kynetx app store for the newly released browser extensions. I super love the new extensions and all that they do for users and developers alike. Something that I forgot when I released the app in the app store is that the new extension are sandboxed.

Because the extensions are sandboxed, all of the scripts from the extensions run a bit differently than they used to in the previous Kynetx extensions. Without getting into the technical details too much, the previous extensions just injected JavaScript into the page and the new extensions run JavaScript in a sandbox which has access to the DOM but can’t access anything else on the page. Because of this change my retweet app broke since I was using the jQuery loaded by Twitter.com to bring up the new tweet box (I do this because Twitter.com used that library to bind a click event and to trigger that event it has to be from the same library that bound it). Thankfully, with the help of a friend, I was able to get a work around for both Firefox and Chrome’s sandbox environment.

How I did it…

If the app is run not inside a sandbox I can just access the jQuery that Twitter.com loads to open a new tweet box

$("#new-tweet").trigger("click");

From within the Firefox sandbox I can access the page outside of the sandbox

window['$']("#new-tweet").trigger("click");

If I am in the Chrome sandbox I can create a script element that has the JavaScript that I want to execute. Crude, but it works. : )

var trigger_click_script = document.createElement("script");
var fallback = "window['$']('#new-tweet').trigger('click');";
trigger_click_script.innerHTML = fallback;
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(trigger_click_script);

Here is the JavaScript code that I ended up with that gets executed when a user clicks on the retweet button.

// get stuff to retweet
var tweet = $K(this).parents(".tweet-content").find(".tweet-text").text();
var name = $K(this).parents(".tweet-content").find(".tweet-screen-name").text();
 
// build tweet
var retweet = "RT @"+name+" "+tweet;
 
// open new tweet box
$("#new-tweet").trigger("click");
 
// hack for FF sandbox
if ($("#tweet-dialog:visible").length === 0) {
  window['$']("#new-tweet").trigger("click");
}
 
// put tweet in new tweet box
$K(".draggable textarea.twitter-anywhere-tweet-box-editor").val(retweet).focus();
$K("#tweet_dialog a.tweet-button.button.disabled").removeClass("disabled");
 
// hack for chrome sandbox
if ($("#tweet-dialog:visible").length === 0) {
  var fallback = "window['$']('#new-tweet').trigger('click'); ";
  fallback += "window['$']('.draggable textarea.twitter-anywhere-tweet-box-editor').val('"+retweet+"').focus(); ";
  fallback += "window['$']('#tweet_dialog a.tweet-button.button.disabled').removeClass('disabled'); ";
  var trigger_click_script = document.createElement("script");
  trigger_click_script.innerHTML = fallback;
  document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(trigger_click_script);
}

How To Rename Mac Terminal Tabs

I’ve been running a lot of terminal windows lately and getting lost in all the tabs has been annoying. I started searching for a solution and figured out that it’s super easy to rename the tabs in the terminal for Mac OS X! While on a terminal tab just use the keyboard shortcut of cmd + i to pull up the inspector window and then rename it. Easy!

Unnamed terminal tabs:

Menu option to bring up inspector:

After using cmd + i to bring up Mac Terminal Inspector:

After renaming tabs in Terminal:

If when you bring the inspector window up with cmd + i and the focus isn’t in the “Title” input, you can use shift + cmd + i to put the focus there. You can then press enter to apply the title change or just press escape to apply the title change and close the inspector.

If you liked this or have other cool ideas, let me know in the comments or on Twitter @MikeGrace

CSS Navigation Border Experiment

I was working on building navigation based on this mockup

Navigation Mockup

Navigation Mockup

I enjoyed building the navigation and thought what I came up with was cool enough to share what I did.

The JavaScript added is just to simulate changing pages.

Example page -> http://mikegrace.s3.amazonaws.com/geek-blog/sandbox/css-nav-border-party.html

Remove Auto-Complete URL Suggestion on cr-48 Google Chrome OS

The other day I misstyped a URL and now Google Chrome auto suggests the wrong URL every time. To remove this auto suggestion on cr-48

  1. Start typing the URL so it will auto suggest it
  2. Use keyboard shortcut ctrl + alt + backspace

Doing this immediately removed the suggestion from my Chrome history on my cr-48 for Chrome OS