Beta

Welcome to ATBar 2 beta. Thank you for taking an interest in the next step for ATBar. Over the last few months we have been busy looking into what to do next with ATBar based on feedback we have received from users over the last year.

 

A common question we often get is Can we have feature x for our institution? Previously this was a bit of a problem, as creating another copy of the toolbar with specific functionality meant creating an entirely new toolbar with a copy of the functions from the main toolbar. This then meant any updates had to be propagated (manually) throughout all of these different copies. On top of this, we were starting to have issues with workarounds we had made for GreaseMonkey (which required the toolbar code to be in the global namespace), restricting how we could take the project further.

 

What we’ve done is create a project called AtKit, which is a rewrite of all of the core toolbar code and released this separately for developers. This provides a ‘toolbar-in-a-box’, with interfaces to add functionality, and keep all associated code sandboxed from the website. We’ve then split all of the functions of ATBar into separate plugins for AtKit.

 

Why AtKit is important

  • AtKit allows us to create toolbars that share functionality without duplicating code.

Plugins can be updated independently of toolbars.

  • Toolbars can be branded

Institution-specific toolbars.

  • Users can build toolbars with specific functionality

Have just the features that you need.

  • Anyone can create plugins.

Limitless extensibility.

  • Multilingual support.

AtKit supports translations in plugins, so if a plugin has been authored to work in the language that the toolbar is set to, you will receive localised text.

 

Improvements over ATBar1:

  • Rewritten from the ground-up.
  • Core toolbar code has been moved into another project, AtKit.
  • ATBar is now built on top of AtKit.
  • All functions has been moved into separate plugins.
  • Compression and quality improvements have reduced the overall size from 64KB to 8.06KB.

 

Overall improvements:

  • Our new infrastructure now has a much higher level of redundancy.
  • Code has all been moved to GitHub and is available under an Open Source licence.
  • Community can directly add functionality to the project.
  • AtKit supports Separators and Spaces between buttons.

 

Testing
To give ATBar 2 a try, drag the image below to your bookmarks (alternatively right click and select Add to Bookmarks). Let us know how you get on!

ATbar
ATBar 2

Or the arabic version of the toolbar:

ATbar
ATBar 2