Marvin - A Paranoid Chrome Extension for Reddit Aliens

NOTE: The latest version of Chrome have broken the APIs Marvin depends on, a rewrite using the new APIs is in progress, please be patient!

Marvin’s Orange Envelope should work with the latest Dev and Beta channels! (OS X only in Dev channel)

Marvin is still a work in progress and still somewhat an experimental ‘prototype’, mostly due to instability in its components (ie., ever shifting Chrome Extension APIs). But should be functional enough to be of good service and help to Reddit aliens.

Current features:

• If current URL has been posted to Reddit, display score, subreddit, author, etc.
• If the URL has been posted multiple times to different subreddits, you can expand the ‘toolstrip’ by clicking the up-arrow icon to display the full information for all posts.
• If it has not been posted, allows to post current page.
• Voting.
• Orange envelope notification, including number of new messages.

TODO:

• Non-reddit.com domains support (post-1.0)
• We need a favico-sized picture of Marvin for the toolbar!
• More convenient re-post mechanism. (Done in 0.9.1)
• Configuration interface and options:
  • Open comments and post pages in current or new tab?
  • Display tool-strip automatically if current URL has been posted. (This used to be the default behavior, but now has been changed to match Socialite.)

Install instructions

At the moment only the dev Chrome channel supports extensions and the extension packaging format is in flux, so if you want to try this, take precautions or you might be electrocuted.

The latest Marvin releases are only tested against the latest Chromium snapshots for Windows. (Feedback and bug reports are very welcome!) Note: Only the Chrome dev channel and the latest chromium releases support extensions and nothing else is likely to work. Note2: Chrome’s support for extension on Linux and OS X seems to be broken even more often than on Windows.

Download the .crx extension package for the latest Marvin from the Downloads page, and if you are running a modern enough version of Chrome you will be asked if you want to install the extension, say yes, and you are done!

If that doesn’t work you might need to start chrome as follows:

chrome.exe –enable-extensions –load-extension=‘c:\Documents and Settings[… path to the location where you have a copy of Marvin … ]\’

Usage instructions

Just click on the alien icon in the address bar to display information about the current page or submit the current page if it has not been submitted yet.

If you have any orange envelopes pending you will see the envelope and the number of pending messages in the toolstrip, click it to go to your inbox.

Known Issues

• You need to visit reddit.com at least once per browsing-session before you can vote (if you haven’t, when you try to vote a new reddit.com tab will be open for you), this is needed to fetch the ‘modhash’ that the reddit API requires for voting. This issue should go away once we start to use the new auth mechanism for the JSON API, but it is still not clear how this should work.
• If your vote causes the number of digits in the score to increase, the score display might become split and partially unreadable.
• Chrome Extensions on Linux seem to still have many issues, the orange envelope notification works, but the address bar icon doesn’t, which makes the extension not very useful.

Code

Marvin’s blueprints are stored in a Mercurial repository, you can check out the code with the following command:

hg clone http://hg.cat-v.org/marvin/

Contact

• The IRC channel #reddit-dev in irc.freenode.org
• The Marvin Subreddit!.
• If you are too shy and paranoid to use a public forum, you can send feedback privately via reddit messages to uriel or see the contact info at uriel.cat-v.org.

Other Alien Creatures

• Glenda, the Rabbit from Outer Space.

Credits/License

Public domain.

Idea inspired-by/ripped-off-from the Firefox Socialite add-on by chromakode, but all code and bugs are 100% original. Thanks also to chromakode for feedback on the GUI and advice regarding the implementation.

Thanks to Pandalicious for very useful feedback, fixes reports, suggestions and some patches!

Quotes

“That girl is one of the least unintelligent organic lifeforms it has ever been my profound lack of pleasure to have been unable to have avoided meeting.”

   -- Marvin the Paranoid Android

“Life? Don’t talk to me about life!”

   -- Marvin the Paranoid Android

About the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (SCC)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a moment of reasoned lucidity, that is almost unique among its five million nine hundred and seventy five thousand five hundred and nine pages, says of the products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation that “it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all”.

In other words, and this is the rock solid principle on which the corporation’s galaxy wide success is founded, their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws, this not only suggests that the SCC is responsible for the majority of personal computer Operating Systems sold across the galaxy, it is a widely respected view, widely held by right thinking people, who are largely recognizable as right thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.

Links

• The Socialite Firefox extension by chromakode.
• Marvin Freshmeat Page.