Tiles 3

[ryanashcraft]

Goals of this rewrite:

• Simplifies the extension's scope to make it easier to maintain:
  • Uses Chrome's bookmarks bar as the primary data source instead of managing the storage and synchronization of Tiles. This should resolve issues about missing or lost Tiles, which is a common complaint. Another major benefit to this change is that we no longer need toolbar button ("browser actions"), a shared background page, and custom inter-tab communication.
  • Removes the options page. Expose settings in other ways (contextual menus, relying on the bookmarks manager for deleting bookmarks and editing titles/URLs).
• Leverages React and fluxible-app. These libraries provide a framework that helps organize the codebase into logical pieces:
  • Components: Tile, TileGrid, TilesApp
  • Actions: loadPage, changeBackgroundColor, resetTileData, changeTileIndex
  • Data stores: TilesStore, ApplicationStore
  • Chrome integration helpers: storage, bookmarks
  • Utilities: getWebsiteColor (this is pretty much the only untouched code left over from Tiles 2)
• Adds ability to rearrange tiles directly from the new tab page. Just drag and drop to rearrange.
• Changes some of the visual design:
  • I decided to drop the two-letter, periodic table-like symbols, and instead just shrink the font and wrap text.

Since this is bringing so many different, big changes, I think the best thing to do is release Tiles 3 as a new extension in the Chrome Web Store.