FlashPlus - Version 1.5.2

FlashPlus 1.5.2 has been released with a couple new features and some minor bug fixes. The adoption of this chrome extension has been growing steadily.You can read the release notes here.

One feature that was asked for by the users was to pop out the flash content into a new window. This would give more real estate to the flash, making watching videos or playing games better. I was considering two approaches to do this.
The first approach involved opening a new window with the current page. The element's selector would be passed to the page. The page would use the selector to pick the element and then make it full screen. The only problem with this approach is constructing the selector. I did write some code for it and it seemed to work, but it would not cater to dynamic elements on the page that change with every page load. You can check out this version here.
An easier approach was to simply pick up the HTML of the flash object, with its params and attributes, place it on the new window with the current URL and convert it to full screen. Since the page in the new window is same as the current page, relative URLs and javascript access to the flash would work fine.

An Options page was also added with the following configuration options.
  • Option to manipulate the flash elements when the page starts. Doing so does not require the flash to reload, and hence, when you load the layer on top of the flash, your movie does not restart. This may have to be turned in cases where the page alignment is screwed.
  •  An option to set the time till which FlashPlus should check for Flash content loaded using Javascript. 
  • Options to show logs in the console window.
  • A footer with details about the extension, author and place to ask for features or report bugs.
There were also some bug fixes
  • Some thumbnails in the Page Action (the FlashPlus Icon in the address bar) do not show up properly. This was due to bad scaling math, which is now corrected
  • iFrame support has been enhanced. 
  • A user pointed FlashPlus was not working on certain pages. This was due to the same CSS class names used. The class names in the extension now have a prefix. 
  • There were logical bugs with permutations of actions like "FullScreen", "Block", "Unblock", "Back to Windowed Mode". This bug was also fixed.
This was a major release with a lot of features put in. There are some more features that I would start working on, when I have time.
The extension is now a substantial amount of code and it would be hard to work on it alone.  I would appreciate any help with coding, please do drop in a comment and we could collaborate.