Orbit-New TAB - Stardance

Ship #1

@ajmaleee__ on Orbit-New TAB · 17 days ago

yayyyyy the shipping dayyyyy ~
____________________________________________________________________

Orbit-New Tab is a browser new tab page that uses NASA’s APOD API to turn every new tab into a giant space wallpaper instead of the usual boring empty screen. the entire thing became way cooler than I expected.

Spent most of the time designing the UI, adding,styling everything, and making the whole tab feel futuristic without turning laggy . Watching the NASA images load properly for the first time LOWKENUENLY felt insanely cool because one moment it’s just code and the next moment your browser is casually showing galaxies, nebulae, black holes, and other terrifying space objects beyond my walnut brains comprehension.

Of course the project also tried to destroy me near the end. The website suddenly froze, backgrounds stopped loading, errors started appearing everywhere, and I spent THREE HOURS debugging the issue like my life depended on it T_T . After aggressively staring at the code long enough to damage my eyesight, I finally discovered the cause:

one missing bracket.

The entire website was collapsing because a single curly bracket decided to disappear from existence. Added it back and suddenly everything worked perfectly again. Modern software engineering is truly beautiful.

____________________________________________________________________
in conclution,i really enjoed the process
special thanks to nasa and stardance for giving me the amazing idea <3

Try project → See source code →

Open comments for this post

@ajmaleee__ on Orbit-New TAB · 17 days ago

3h 0m 10s logged

Last devlog before ship..hopefully

sooo,the website randomly started freezing and the APOD image stoped loading

after HOURSSS, i was able to spot the error,and guess wot?

a silly ahh colon and a bracket caused the issue T_T

the 3 hours here is not me coding,but RE-READING THE ENTIRE SOURCE CODE 10 TIMES

but at the end of the day,i found the issue solved it ! >v<

my eyes are strained out aff…

SHIPPING IT RNNNNN

these 2 thingys marked caused the issue btw T_T

Open comments for this post

@ajmaleee__ on Orbit-New TAB · 17 days ago

4h 6m 19s logged

APOD SITE : The journey

for the past 3 days,i devoloped the APOD site step by step,the work done are as belowwweee

Day 1(planning): went thru chrome webstore to find inspiration,here is what i decided to use imma project

main inspiration from MATERIAL NEW TAB ,i really liked the ai tools button,the layout and the overall feel

-went thru design catalouge(idk its spelling T_T), decided to try nuemorphism this time,since i already have a lil bit expierence on it from last project

DAY 2( implimenting what i jus decided on day 1): wrote the html,css and script for the site.

-decided to stay with gray background until i impliment api to prevent my eyes from getting flashbanks in the dark (expirence is the biggest teacher T_T )

-added search tab ,some shorcuts we all use daily

-added the ai tools feature , thanks to MATERIAL NEW TAB for the inspiration

-used an online css design helper tool to help me find the desired values, positions, pixel heights , etc

AI USE - used ai to help me with animations,as my setup looked too flat without emmm

DAY 3( nasa’s API,finishing touches): implimented the most important part,the APOD bg YYAAYYAAAYAYAY

-added an info tab to display the information abt the pic coming along with the APOD image

-decided to add a lil bit of blur to the bg image,since othervice it messes up the nuemorphism theme

-i noticed a the bg takes a lot of time to load in hdurl, so im lowering the bg image quality,wont make much of a difference tho

AI USE - im new to APOD api,used chatgpt to learn the syntax of the request,and how to impliment it.asked claude add a fallback solid bg in case it fails to fetch the image

few fixes and shipping soooooon