The onFocusing Sessions, Devlog 5: Houston, we have focused!

You can now set NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day as your new tab wallpaper! With this update, a new settings menu has also been added, where you can change between the NASA APOD or onFocus’s default wallpaper; Aurora Blobs.

due to the randomized nature of the NASA APOD, this can create problems with the visibility of on-screen texts and images, cuz some pictures may be brighter or darker than others. thats why, when in NASA APOD wallpaper mode, a dimming config will appear in settings, allowing you to get the image to look just right in relation to the other on-screen elements.

I have also added into the settings menu the config to set a different search engine other than duckyduckygooo. you can choose between a set of engines in a dropdown, or add a link to a custom search engine.

you may call this the first actual release of onFocus! this version is going to get shipped. but, a second ship will start development immediately afterwards, with new features to enhance your experience!

The onFocusing Sessions, Devlog 4: ITS ALIVEEE

sooo slight detour… I delayed the NASA APOD thingy to prioritize getting onFocus’s main features up and running. because why if no focus features, why focus shaped? so yea! now it’s an actually useable new tab replacement for your current one!

the focus features have been added. this includes your task/focus creator, pomodoro timer, and focus history. your very important and essential search bar has also been added, with duckygo as the default search engine. expect a custom search engine selector in a future update!

isnt it so fun when you are falling asleep while programming and you make a typo and dont realize you did until oh wow why is my code not working?? yea i find that EXTREMELY funn…

next up for tomorrow’s me to deal with: i’m finally getting the NASA APOD wallpaper setting up and running. once that’s done, imma ship this thing’s first release. but that wont be the end, imma ship again afterwards with more features!!

The onFocusing Sessions, Devlog 3: onFocus invades your browser, muehehe

guysss, finally, tangible progress has been made! with the addition of the Manifest V3, alongside other configs, onFocus can now be installed as an extension on Chromium-based browsers in extension developer mode and take over your (allegedly) very bloated and time-consuming new tab!
For our fellow non-Chromium browser users, you may set the live demo link as your homepage, cuz custom extension installs are just temporary (one browser restart and they be gone) and for the possibility of permanent installs i would have to get it signed, and that would take too long…

the codebase is still one for both the extension and website, with a small storage layer that quietly uses chrome.storage inside the extension and localStorage on the web.

with this update, a semi-functional UI has also been added to onFocus. It features a time-triggered greeter and a clock, as well as a background with three CSS-animated blobs. soo cool!! for them to move and breathe around, you need to enable animation effects in your OS, otherwise they gonna stay still the whole time.

next, I will start working on getting NASA’s APOD as a background option, so you can choose between that and the onFocus blobs!

The onFocusing Sessions, Devlog 2: Graphicssss

most of the work on onFocus today went to creating its graphical identity: logos, wordmarks, etcc! Took time to settle on colors and designs, but ended with something I feel very happy with! Its logo icon features a crescent moon with a star, to represent focus and late-night work sessions. The color palette chosen gives it a “minty clean” feeling, just like our (planned) UI!

main issue today involved the fact that I used live text on the wordmark when designing it in Affinity, so when exported to SVG, if the host device didn’t have the custom font, it would look horrible in a fallback sans-serif, and thats putting it lightly. So I just ended up using PNGs for all designs to avoid a big headache… also dealt with few canvas dimension issues and embedded bitmaps with no actual paths in supposed “vector” icons, but nothing beyond that.

Once all the graphics were ready, they were added to the GitHub README, the placeholder in the live demo, and wherever necessary! now, it doesn’t look stale and boring! and thats funn!

next up, we return to work on the actual new tab itself! we’ll prepare the Manifest V3 extension wrapper, so onFocus can actually take over a new tab page and finally give you that much needed focus!

The onFocusing Sessions, Devlog 1: Humble Beginnings

welcome to the development of onFocus, a new tab page that helps you keep your mind where your work is, instead of on the distractions killing our chances of becoming responsible human beings. you’ll be able to set a focus session, run a timer against it, and get weekly reports on where your time actually went. Time runs and waits for nobody, yk!

as with any project, work today involved getting the whole structure and basics up and running, so a lot of scaffolding, cleaning, configuring, ETCCC. as we all know, that’s E V E R Y B O D Y ’ S favorite part, so funnnnn…
few issues here and there, biggest one being when I had to install node through VS Code terminal and then it refused to accept it existed, so every new terminal window was getting a “snapshot” from before the install, until VS Code got its little restart.

as for important decisions, today was decided that onFocus should exist and run as both a website and as a browser extension for mass access, and those live at completely different URLs, so every asset path in the build has to be relative rather than absolute. what this mostly involved was one new line in the vite config, to get both targets with one build. kill two birds with one stone right there!

live demo up and running, but it’s just fun placeholder stuff. real progress on design and structure next!