Back in 2008, it was a different time. Applications were far more limited, and so we IT folks had to get creative with our work. I loved Chrome from day one. I was a bit of a fan. However, it lacked the ability to customize the UI, and in those days, I felt all the need to have my desktop running in cool matrix digits. So I did the only thing I could, I made a chrome theme editor with over 1 million downloads(unfortunately, that was via a third-party download site which is no longer around to screenshot.)
After gaining popularity and solidifying its purpose, I renamed the project Xchrome. A few primary features developed into this app that I had not faced before were:
- Registering a windows protocol so you could use chrometheme://URLOFTHEME, and it would launch our app from the browser, allowing instant shortcuts to new thems from websites.
- Compression, when users created a new theme in our editor, it would compress the theme into an easy-to-install EXE to share with others that could be imported into our theme manager.
- A live community of thousands grew very quickly and I had to manage that community with only help from a few dedicated fans.
- Basic product version control and distribution
- Logo design
- Basic UX
The community around this product was very strong here is a forum post with 10k views
This is one of my projects that I was proud to be a part of and enjoyed creating and supporting, Chrome now has this feature built-in and my application rendered obsolete. I leave this page as a homage.