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Contextinator: Divide your web browsing into projects

75 points| _ankit_ | 13 years ago |contextinator.cs.vt.edu | reply

23 comments

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[+] glomph|13 years ago|reply
One thing that would be nice is if you could right click and 'send to project' tabs from another project or an unclaimed window.

Or even have checkboxes by tabs in the project list that allow you to select lots and send them all to another project.

That way say you have a lot of tabs open and you suddenly realise that half are procrastination and half are part of a project, you could send the first half to a new project and keep the second half open as a procrastination window.

Adding to this the ability to merge projects would be cool.

[+] zorlem|13 years ago|reply
A really useful extension! Could be the solution to the tab overload.

I would like to have the ability to migrate tabs between projects too. For some reason drag&drop of tabs between Chromium windows (under Ubuntu) has never worked for me. Copying (or moving) bookmarks and tasks would be really useful as well.

One more thing that would be nice is a check for duplicate project names. I've managed to create two projects with identical names and now can't find a way to delete one of them.

[+] pajju|13 years ago|reply
Kudos! Mind = blown. This is one of the Internet's very well-thought-projects. Great idea and execution.

Quick Feedback: Always start with the pain-point you are trying to solve! It gets very-interesting from there. Put a story with the theme moving around! Case-studies will help too.

Let me put my story for you:

There is no single tool out there for -- project-resource-management. I use different tools, scattered across. I use trello for project-management, delicious for link-management, dropbox and Gdrive for project related files. And every time I can track and better understand my mind, my workflows and project-tasks if things are organized and easily discoverable.

Now with Contextinator tool, I can come back again to a task, by avoiding multi-tasking or context-switching among tasts/projects! Its like saving all your project-task links for later. One place to manage all. Something like Link management for projects. Think as a Task-resource Dashboard ? :D

Currently, I'm doing a hack to make it work by saving chrome-sessions for later, its almost the same, i.e save all your browser-links with a task-name for later user.

And I keep a workflow like -- one task for one window. HN browsing is one window. Gmail is one window. Trello boards in one window. Note: I have tried many combinations, still experimenting. Also session based saving works fine too. And all gets better over experimentation and based on your workflows and thoughts.

Finally this will be of great use to me. Thanks.

[+] zerovox|13 years ago|reply
Worth pointing out that this is pretty similar to tab groups available in Firefox, with added commands when right clicking on a tab to move to a group.
[+] mackmcconnell|13 years ago|reply
I think this is a super realistic way to approach project management in when we're using a bunch of different services, all in different tabs in a browser.

I use Evernote to do the task management that the Contextinator Home Page gives you and I have a shortcut to open up all my project-relevant tabs quickly in a browser. It's a pretty similar setup, and a bit less elegant but it does the trick for me. If the task-management side of Contextinator looked a bit more like Evernote (tags, sharing, etc...) I think it would be even better.

That being said, I think it's a super cool way to manage projects. Keep it up _ankit_!

[+] Zaheer|13 years ago|reply
Wow this amazing. I frequently have tens of tabs open because I am typically working on multiple projects at once and don't want to bookmark all the pages while doing research.

Solves a pain point I have in a clean and simple fashion. The best a product can be.

[+] pilooch|13 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure this would be useful to me, but at install it does ask for 'access your data on all website'. Now, what does this mean exactly ? I do understand this is very much probably not this extension's fault, but Chrome being very vague.
[+] _ankit_|13 years ago|reply
Yes, I understand that is a very scary sounding permission.

Maybe I need to explicitly mention on the extension installation page that we are not capturing any browser history or such.

Since we need to keep track of tabs for each project, maybe that's what pops up this message.

[+] guyfawkes303|13 years ago|reply
I would love this, combined with the functionality of 'StayFocusd'. That way I can block distracting websites (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter) during work periods, but just as easily unblock those sites and BLOCK work sites during weekends for example.
[+] edwinyzh|13 years ago|reply
It's quite useful when one is doing Internet researches! I've just started using it in my searching for a html beautifier SDK for LIVEditor (my live html/css code editor).

Would you consider adding a 'Notes' section, just like 'Tasks'?

[+] _ankit_|13 years ago|reply
Good to know!

One of the main ideas for future direction is to integrate it more with existing services for Todos (RememberTheMilk, etc.), Notes (Evernote, etc.), instead of rebuilding those tools.

So, imagine having an Evernote notebook for a project, and managing all notes from it on the homepage. That way your information is still in the cloud, in the service of your choice, but accessible within the context of a project.

[+] sysout|13 years ago|reply
Awesome! Where do you store the info? Is it possible to sync between multiple machines?
[+] arb99|13 years ago|reply
I can see this really catching on, it would be really handy in quite a few situations.
[+] lunixbochs|13 years ago|reply
Cool idea, but it seems to have at least one weird side effect (visited an image link on OS X and it added broken unstyled UI to the page itself :/)

I'm interested enough to follow its updates.

[+] pygy_|13 years ago|reply
This looks awesome.

I'm trying to switch back from Chrome to Firefox, though... Is there an extension (or a set thereof) approaching this one?

[+] Tobu|13 years ago|reply
Ctrl-Shift-E in Firefox.

(Unfortunately I tend to overflow it, and it's impossible to create groups after that)

[+] grimman|13 years ago|reply
You have tab groups built in, but no tasks system. For me it's quite sufficient as I get tasks through employers.