Official Turn Off the Lights Blog

The Lovie Award announced that Turn Off the Lights Browser extension for YouTube and Beyond named finalist for best Websites, Web Services & Applications in the 7th annual Lovie Awards.

This is a major achievement for as a Europe developer. It shows that Turn Off the Lights Browser extension ranks of the European Internet’s best and brightest.
But we need your help to get there. We encourage you, your partner, your friends, your friends at work, family and neighbors to vote for Turn Off the Lights. Your support means a lot to us!
Vote Now for Turn Off the Lights – The Lovie Awards

This is a Major Achievement: What Does It Mean to Be a Lovie Awards Finalist?

This is an unparalleled honour! This was The Lovie Awards most competitive season yet, with nearly 1,500 entries from 33 countries. As a Finalist, our work has been selected as among the best in its category and is in the top 20% of all work entered and now competes for Europe’s two most coveted awards: the Gold, Silver and Bronze Lovie Award, as chosen by the Academy in each category, and the People’s Lovie Award, voted on by the online public. These Awards are a mark of distinction for European Internet excellence.

Voting for People’s Lovie is open from today, 19 September to Thursday, 5 October at 11:59 BST:
Vote Now for Turn Off the Lights – The Lovie Awards

Today we got exciting news for Safari 10 users (for macOS Sierra and High Sierra)! The Turn Off the Lights Safari extension is now available in the Apple App Store:
Download Now Turn Off the Lights for Safari

Apple asks indirect to his Safari extension developers to transits to his own macOS platform. We quoted the message from on the ‘Safari Extensions Development Guide’ page:

Important: As of Safari 10.0 on macOS 10.11.5, Safari extensions are created as app extensions in Xcode. New extensions are wrapped in a containing macOS app and are distributed and sold on the App Store. If you have created an extension with the methods described in this document, consider transitioning to the new extensions model. To start developing Safari app extensions, see Safari App Extension Programming Guide.

Safari App Extension Development

We converted everything within 2 months to the Safari App Extension platform. And still keeping our main JavaScript files and HTML options page. It was a hard work to get same great experience in the Safari web browser. There are some good benefits in this platform, but there also some bad ones. Here the comparison for users and developers:

+ In the Apple Store you can see the screenshots of what our extension can do in your Safari web browser. And the App Store installs automatically the latest version.
+ You get a better performance in the Safari web browser.
+ You as user know that Apple as reviewed our Safari extension, before publishing it on the App Store. And that there is no security or privacy issues.

+ As developers, we can write our code in the Swift language, that is almost the same style as JavaScript.
– As developers, we lost many times on how to convert the “background.js” to the Swift app extension handler. And many existing functions must be reengineered, so the Safari extension can communicate well from the Options page to the background and to lamp button.

In the new Turn Off the Lights Safari App Extension you get the same Options page as in the regular browser extension version. And to access the Turn Off the Lights Options page is by opening the ‘Turn Off the Lights for Safari’ app from your Launchpad.

Browser Extension Standard

However, we believe in a standard for developing a browser extension. Google Chrome, Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge got this standard. As we hope that other companies will follow later also this standard.

If you are just reading this new blog post and you like our project. Please do not forget to donate us. Whether it is $1 or $100, your support is immensely appreciated!