The 'pick a station to begin' state was too subtle on first install
(David's own 30-second panic moment when he uninstalled the dev build
and reinstalled from the Web Store, 2026-06-09 evening).
Two layered cues, both pure CSS driven by a body.is-first-run class:
1. Subtle accent-green glow pulses around:
- popup: the station list section
- newtab: the Quick Stations chip row
(rgba alpha 0.18-0.25, 2.4s ease-in-out infinite — visible but not noisy)
2. Bouncing ↓ arrow appended to the 'Pick a station to begin' text in
both surfaces (after-pseudo with translateY animation).
The is-first-run class is toggled in popup.js + newtab.js via a new
reflectFirstRunHint() function called from:
- init() once stations + currentStation are resolved
- onPickStation() the moment a user picks
- the chrome.storage.onChanged listener when another surface picks
(so the hint disappears on both surfaces simultaneously)
Existing users with stored currentStationId never see either cue —
the class only attaches when currentStation is null.
Working on branch v0.4.0-prep so the live main (= what shipped to
Web Store v0.3.0) is unchanged. Merge to main when ready to bump the
manifest version + readme.txt + CHANGELOG.md for v0.4.0 release.
Web Store submission target. Mirrors rangerhq-radio's track-history pattern
(inc/history.php) so the family stays coherent across surfaces.
Highlights
- New Tab Page override (Tier 2.5) — Chrome's default new tab replaced with
a RangerHQ-branded landing showing the player, current track, quick chips,
searchable browse list, and now history + favourites tabs.
- Track history + favourites — capped FIFO 500, dedup against last entry,
skip "(unknown)" artist (SomaFM dead-air). Stored in chrome.storage.local
under tuner.history + tuner.favourites.
- 4-button search per entry — Spotify / YouTube / Apple Music / Bandcamp.
Pure public-search-URL link-outs in a new tab, NO auth, NO API keys, NO
quota, NO third-party SDK embedded.
- Options page (chrome://extensions → details → options) — live stats,
history cap slider (50-500), Clear history / Clear favourites / Clear
EVERYTHING buttons, About panel with Gitea + davidtkeane.com links.
- Popup nav row — Open in tab / History (#hash deep link) / Settings,
using chrome.tabs.create + chrome.runtime.openOptionsPage. No new perms.
- Cross-surface sync — popup ↔ newtab listen on chrome.storage.onChanged
for tuner.currentStationId / tuner.isPlaying / history / favourites.
- Storage gateway — offscreen doc can't reliably reach chrome.storage in
some Chrome versions, so it sends LOG_TRACK_REQUEST to the SW which
does the write. history.js also defensively guards every storage call.
- Metadata latency fix — polling now starts immediately on PLAY, in
parallel with audio buffer fill. First track display drops from
~10-15s to ~1-2s.
Permissions unchanged
- Still ["offscreen", "storage"] + somafm.com host only.
- chrome.tabs.create works on our own extension URLs without "tabs" perm.
- No webRequest, no <all_urls>, no third-party SDK.
Bumped from 0.1.0 (last tag on Gitea) directly to 0.3.0.
v0.2.0 (newtab + clock) was a working local build but never tagged;
its features ship together with v0.3.0 in this single commit.
ranger