Salence

Increasing productivity and motivation with a chrome extension!

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Inspiration

When we noticed the amount of people that were not being productive while working from home we felt like we needed to create something. This is when Salence was born.

What it does

Salence is a chrome extension that increases motivation and productivity while working/hacking from home. Salence has many features that can help people increase their productivity and motivation. One of these features is a "tab replacer." Once the extension is installed, every time you open a new tab it will display a motivational image and quote. The motivational image and quote will always change when you open a new tab. It will also display the current time and date along with a greeting. At the top right there is also a reminders feature. This feature allows someone to enter a reminder and it will display that reminder even if you close chrome or open a new tab. In addition that there are features in the popup window of the extension. To access those features click the blue S logo in the extensions bar. Once you have opened the popup you will see a timer that can be used to help manage long study periods. You can set the amount of the time you would like to be productive for. In addition to that there is also a website blocker that blocks most socially media platforms such as Instagram. This features helps peoples stay productive. Lastly there are many reading features that help you stay productive. To access the reading features click the glasses icon. You can then select a font and it will change that font on the current page you are on. This helps make the text more readable. There is also a image blocker and ad blocker which helps people focus on the text and not get distracted by the images, which increases productivity. You can also change the background color, font color and letter spacing on a site. Changing the background and font color to your favourite color has scientifically been proven to increase productivity. There is also a text to speech function which will read out a piece of text for you. And lastly there is a dictionary feature where you can search up a word. Due to time constraints, I was not able to show how to load the extension into chrome (since it is not part of the chrome webstore). To load it into chrome go to the github link in this submission and read the README.md file.

How we built it

We used Sublime Text 3 to program the extension. For languages of code we used HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

We found it hard to program the reminders feature without our own database/server. We had trouble keeping the reminders without anywhere to store the information. Luckily, with the use of a couple of foreign JavaScript functions, we overcame this issue in a very simple manner.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Not only was this program very successful, this was our first and second hackathons. We were able to finish a working and beneficial program within 3 days while having little experience with coding!

What we learned

We learned a lot about the three languages of code I mentioned before (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). Furthermore, we learned how to create a working chrome extension in just 3 days!

What's next for Salence

In the future we plan to add this into the chrome web store so that way the installation process is very easy. We also want to make this a mobile app for Android and IOS aswell.

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