With Chrome extensions available in recent Mac builds I decided to try them out. While there is quite a selection, I do not need an entire website extracted into an extension. For example, all I want from a Twitter extension is a badge to appear when there are unread messages. Rather than click through all the Twitter extensions available I decided it’d be productive to create my own to explore Chrome extension development.

Google, as usual, provides nice documentation and examples to get you started. It turned out to be as simple as defining a JSON manifest file and utilizing a few Chrome specific APIs. The resulting extension source code is available on GitHub.

I definitely see myself creating more extensions in the future.