I have Google Chrome and the extensions installed on it. I would like to reduce number of extension buttons on Chrome panel.
For this I want to create my plugin which will display popup window and allow to run another extension installed on my browser?
Is it possible and where I can find examples?
The messaging API has an external extension feature. You can use that communicate between extensions.
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I'm diving into the world of Chrome Extension development, primarily because there is a very small feature that is missing in Chrome that I miss dearly. The context-menu option to "Set as background/wallpaper" like that found in Firefox. Sounds trivial, but it's convenient.
I have most of the "basic" stuff worked out with the manifest file, am able to install it, even managed to get it to show up as a context menu item.
The problem obviously is that I am wanting to mess with a user's OS-level settings which is extremely difficult because of security issues (fully understand this).
I found an extension that allowed this in older versions of Chrome, and it looked like the developer used some type of .dll and C++ to accomplish this.
I'm not really sure how to make this work.
Since that Chrome doesn't allow these kind of manipulations (such as your PC's settings), you will need to create a native application that will run beside your extension. When the user chooses the image from your extension and selects "use as wallpaper", you will use the native messaging API to send a message to your desktop application, that will set the wallpaper (and do whatever else you can't do within a chrome extension) for you.
You can use the chrome.wallpaper app api to set the wallpaper after using the messaging api to send the image from your extension.
Is it possible to create system hotkeys/shortcuts for Google Chrome Extension? I mean hotkeys that also works when Chrome doesn't have focus.
Yes, but it won't be trivial. To get truly global hotkeys you will have to use native messaging. You will need to create some application to run in the background and capture keypresses and then you can send those keypresses back to Chrome through stdout. This approach will require you to create an additional installer for your extension to install the native messaging app onto the user's system...before you could bundle your app along with the extension (using NPAPI) but that has recently been phased out. I have seen some discussion in the Chromium group about adding bundling support for native messaging apps, but nothing has been added (yet).
Another much easier option is to use the Chrome commands API which will enable you to use hotkeys across all Chrome windows (but not globally...). Just something to consider if "true" global hotkeys are not an absolute requirement since this approach is (much) less complex.
Global media keys will be added to Chrome soon, however. There is a good discussion about this feature to read here.
It's now part of Chrome: chrome://extensions/shortcuts
I'm writing an extension.
A part of this extension contains an html page.
I'd call that page, also as a Google Apps,
inserting an icon between applications of chrome.
It's possible create a manifest file to integrate the chrome app with chrome extension?
No. You'd create both an app an an extension, then encourage the user to install both if you detected that one wasn't installed.
There is an outstanding feature request to allow bundled installations of multiple apps/extensions.
Is it possible to create a browser extension that would allow page-controlled window opacity? Not so that various elements on the page are of a given opacity, but to allow one to see other windows (like the desktop) behind the browser page.
Thank you.
No, this is not possible in an extension. Such transparency would be handled at the window manager level, and would require platform-specific code. This means that either Chrome would have to add this feature and expose it as an extension API (currently no such feature exists), or you would have to write a plugin.
I plan to build a Chrome Extension that allows users to navigate web pages via voice commands.
To do so, I plan to put my speech recognition program on a backend server that connects with clients via Chrome extension.
Is it possible? I know how to develop an extension, but would appreciate if you could show a way of receiving voice input.
You don't need to modify Chrome.
Until the HTML5 tag gets landed in Chrome, your only option right now is to use NPAPI and include the plugin into your Extension. For more information visit this page:
http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/npapi.html
You would have to implement a JavaScript audio input API using C++ inside Chromium, being aware that you have to transfer data through the sandbox, then once exported you can use the new API in your extension.
A lot of groundwork has already been done on specifying the audio API, read the details over at W3C:
http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/specification/specification.html
Which links to details of a special build of Chrome with some already built samples:
http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/index.html