Everyone needs a bit of flair in their browsing, especially when working on that assignment or report that the teacher/boss wants on your desk by morning. So here are some extensions that are a bit of fun and a good distraction from whatever you are meant to be doing. Many of these extensions are links, but they are all available for download through the Chrome Web Store. This post has no traditional games, or extensions that run in the background while you browse, so prepare to be distracted!
KeyHero
Have you ever wondered how fast you really type? Well this extension is for you, it offers short touch typing tests in the classic format, but with short to medium length quotes. The aim is to type the quote as fast as you can and at the end it will show the budding typist their statistics including speed (wpm), accuracy and what the extension deems is the cause of most of your mistakes. Although a singular test does not take long it is just too easy to start another and another and another. Trying to beat your high score, its genius rests in its simplicity and its stats. Not many typing tests offer statistics like the ones that KeyHero does, and I have never seen such advanced ones offered for free. The simplicity of typing a short quote rather than a 2 page document and the lack of "lessons" although seemingly taking the value out of a typing focused extension gives this one its value. Practising your typing in little bursts rather than long sessions takes the chore out of it, especially compared to Mavis Beacon and Typershark type software. The downsides of KeyHero would have to be the lack of typing help to an extent it does offer some advice with a half page getting started and a myriad of user tips although. Also it looks a bit worn and could do with a bit of polishing and work to bring it up to the aesthetic level seen in higher end websites.
Strangely addictive, informative, powerful but needs some work to be brought into this decade
Colrd
Colrd is a nice little space for designers and colour lovers. One uses sliders, that include the classic red, green, blue and three additional sliders for luminosity, hue (a simpler way to get to roughly the right colour you want, especially if your not very good with rgb sliders) and saturation. This extension is a great way to catalogue colours, and also gradients and colour schemes. It's nice and simple and has good features such as viewing the colour fullscreen, without distraction. It also offers a grid of at least 100 similar colours to explore and a community of not just colours but also patterns, gradients and schemes. It is quite comparable to adobe's "Kuler" but the addition of patterns and without the flash layout (seemingly an adobe prerequisite) that I often find glitchy and slow. This is a nice little mindless toy to fiddle with but it also a community and powerful design tool
Clear, simple, practical and sleek but could use optional CMYK sliders
BeatLab
I kinda don't like BeatLab, there is nothing wrong with it. It's sleek and it brings me back to the days many a year ago when I wanted to make music, particularly using looping software. That's what beatlab is really, a nice clear simple layout for looping online. The thing that was annoying me mostly is there is no real help through the site to get you making something more interesting than anything you would make with a average sense of musical style and a (musical) keyboard. I sat fiddling for an hour and everything I made sounded terrible. It was as fruitless as my experiments with fruityloops and about as difficult. With BeatLab's claim of ease I felt cheated. I may come back to it but I didn't really like it. Ignoring that though, one can easily waste a lot of time, it does have a lot of variety in samples and is quite powerful. Best of all it comes at the low low price of free.
complex, powerful for something web based and definitely not simple but at least it looks good
TweetDeck
TweetDeck has to be my favourite social tool, its desktop version is my favourite social dashboard of all time, and the Chrome extension has some nice features. TweetDeck is marketed as Twitter for professionals. The extension is nowhere near as polished as the Desktop Client but it is still my extension of choice for social networking; it really does have the same charm. One can link their facebook and twitter accounts (and others like foursquare). Post from facebook fan pages, your regular facebook, and twitter accounts or a combination of the above listed. It also has a nice system of displaying information, like seesmic, hootsuite and many others, it organizes information into columns. In the simplest practical form it has three columns, one for everyone you follow on twitter and your friends and likes on facebook, your direct message inbox and another for every public tweet that directly relates to you and your facebook notifications. One can add extra columns for trending topics, other social networks or twitter lists. One can set little pings and popups for tweets and other notifications creating the ultimate distraction. I find it annoying that you have to click a button to open a little window to type your status, and then you must click "tweet". Also you cannot reply to facebook messages within TweetDeck, instead you have to open facebook, and it doesn't even offer a link to do so.
nice, easy to use, perfect distraction but some things feel like they were designed to make life harder
a Google a Day
a Google a Day is yet another website with an extension in the form of a link, but that seems to be 80% of all chrome extensions anyway. Google a day increases your googling skills, by giving you a question and you have to use Google to find the answer as quickly as possible. It's a formula that's hard to mess up, the layout is neat and very "Google-like". Beware of using Google a day if you have slow internet as both the timer does not seem to stop during loading and because it becomes really frustrating when your trying to get in the mindset of speed googling. I don't think there are any flaws with this extension per say, but I think there are things that really could be done to make it better, for example a version for children, or a mode where educators can enter questions and send the set to their students as homework. As is it is a neat little distraction.
Neat and simple but has so much wasted potential.
What are your favourite distracting extensions for chrome? Join the discussion on twitter, facebook and the comments bellow :)
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