Last night, I came across a link someone had shared on my timeline on Twitter that was singing praises about a certain Chrome extension for Dribbble. Obviously, my curiosity piqued and I decided to check it out. Benchwarmer, as it turns out, is one awesome sauce of a chrome extension.
Benchwarmer is a simple, light-weight Chrome extension that replaces your default “new tab” screen with previews of shots from Dribbble. You can choose to see shots from the Popular, Everyone, Debuts on your own feed. Once installed, every time you open a new tab Benchwarmer will quickly fetch the latest shots from the feed and display it in the browser. Hovering over each shot has a cool effect that lifts the bottom half to show you the details like the number of likes that shot has and who has posted it. You can either click on the link to view it on Dribbble or click on the player’s avatar to go to his profile.
Benchwarmer has been designed and developed by Michael Sacca of Tiny Factory with the help of Scott Corgan, Areus Wade, Alexander Rolek & @daryl. I spoke to Michael about this, who says that the extension was mostly built in about two weeknights/weekends and was the result of experimenting with ideas for creating mini-apps. There’s a lot more that he plans to improve and introduce in the extension, but is only held back due to Dribbble’s limited API.
You can download the extension for free from the Chrome web store or if you’re looking to contribute to it, the extension has been open sourced on github.