HypeMachine Chrome Extension HotFix

Published 2011-08-18 on Farid Zakaria's Blog

Ninja Update

I haven't been using my HypeMachine Extension lately, which has caused me to fall behind in maintaining the extension. Someone had just e-mailed me recently regarding how the extension is no longer working.

I should really integrate a settings option for the extension that points people to the GitHub EPR system.

I've updated the Extension on my GitHub and you can follow these steps for installing the extension:

  1. Download the extension.
  2. Unzip the extension.
  3. Go to your Chrome's Extension page: chrome://extensions, and make sure the page is in Developer mode.
    • If Developer mode has a + by it, click the + to add developer information to the page. The + changes to a -, and more buttons and information appear.
  4. Click the Load unpacked extension button. A file dialog appears
  5. In the file dialog, navigate to your extension's folder and click OK.
  6. Enjoy!

For the curious

For those that are curious what had caused the extension to break, HypeMachine had changed from using Prototype and started using jQuery instead.

This change had caused all the instances of referring to Prototype's selector $$ to no longer work. The hook into Prototype's Ajax responder was also rendered useless.

I had decided to change the code to support Prototype rather than other options available, such as including myself the prototype.js file. This was done because I'm not sure if Prototype can still hook into Ajax requests done via jQuery. Once all the selector's and event handlers had been moved to jQuery, the extension worked again!

As an aside: Sometimes Very rarely the download arrows are not fully renered and I'm unsure why. If you know the reason and/or fix, please let me know. Here is an example: