Extension

This week, our group continued implementing the Firefox extension NYU Clock and managed to have a working product by the day of presentation. In last week’s blog post, I mentioned that the clock wouldn’t show the correct time for different time zones, and luckily I was able to fix this issue soon. I updated the visual design of the popup menu to make it look more NYU by referring to the university’s Graphic & Visual Design page. I used the colors from the main color palette and changed the font to NYU’s official font family, Gotham. I also updated the style of the clock by adding CSS text shadow to make it easier to read.

Collaboration

Through working in a group, I have learned that different people can have very different styles in contributing to a project. For example, although Kyle only made one commit throughout the project, he’s the one who wrote most of the JavaScript code. I was really surprised when he told us that he had most of the functionalities implemented, and thanks to his great work, we were able to get the extension done very soon. Meanwhile, I prefer to commit the change to GitHub once it’s made despite how small the change is, such as modifying the CSS or replacing several words in the comment. In addition, I found that although Slack is a great tool for collaborating remotely, sometimes it can still be hard to get spontaneous response, and can thus be less efficient than meeting face-to-face.

Presentation

The in-class presentation this Wednesday was a really fun time. I enjoyed watching groups present their extensions with a great sense of humor. When presenting our extension there was unfortunately a glitch, and although I was able to fix it right away by simply reloading, we should have tested it more thoroughly before the presentation. But in general, I think our presentation went pretty well. And talking about other groups’ extensions, I really liked mockbob , not only because of the interesting concept (who doesn’t like SpongeBob, or memes!), but also because of the detailed and nice documentation. I was also impressed by Table of Contents, which is a very useful extension with a nice user interface. I liked how the group designed their own icon with Photoshop to avoid any copyright issues.

I also learned a lot though the Q&A time with the professor. Many groups, including us, had issues in citing the sources we found on the Internet. For example, we used images from the Internet and uploaded them to the GitHub repository of the project without attributing the source, which is not okay even though the images are free. I will be more careful when working with online sources in the future.