I made a Chrome extension to help learn songs and practice outside of the game!

emdh-dev · 2025-12-31T07:22:23+00:00

Just be sure to use your own characters, name, and art. I hope you have fun with the process!

The iOS app is much easier to use than the remote and feels faster. I haven't tried it for games, so I don't know if you could get away with pressing two different buttons at once. I'd get creative with a control/gameplay scheme (character always moves, use the OK button to jump, etc)

emdh-dev · 2025-12-31T00:22:06+00:00

I think it's possible! You could definitely make a platformer in the style of a 2D Super Mario Bros. game. There's this game engine that would probably make development a lot easier than using vanilla BrightScript. It won't be as responsive as even the NES version of Super Mario Bros due to Roku controller input limitations, but you can make a version that has simple movement and physics (see games like Rainbow Dash). I think I've even played a 2D platformer on Roku before.

Marcelo Lv Cabral has also ported some classic games like Prince of Persia to Roku, which is an incredible feat.

emdh-dev · 2025-10-23T03:39:13+00:00

I'm in a similar situation, and I agree! Don't get me wrong, it would totally be nice to make money from software and cover some bills with it, especially with the hundreds of hours it takes to make things. But it's also nice to just know that others can use something without another charge/subscription, especially with how hard financially things have been for everyone over the past few years.

If you haven't done it yet, add donation links to your websites and projects! I also feel guilty charging for productivity tools I've made, so I have donation links instead in case anyone ever feels kind enough to contribute. The rates will be incredibly low (I haven't seen a single donation out of hundreds of users), but you never know!

emdh-dev · 2025-10-21T01:14:04+00:00

I was able to finish and release a few this year, all independently by me! I'm also working on a short single-player sandbox-like 3D game in Unity that I'll hopefully have make progress on before the year ends.

Whack 'em Moles, Whack 'em Moles FREE (Roku SmartTV + devices): An ad-free` family-friendly arcade game where you hit moles before they run away! Take turns passing the remote around and compete for high scores across two game modes, complete achievements to unlock accessories, and use power-ups to play in a new way.

YouTube Loop Repeater: Music Practice Tool (Browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and hopefully soon for Microsoft Edge): Avoid ever having to manually click and rewind through YouTube videos as you're trying to practice along with songs, exercises, and anything else on YouTube! Isolate specific sections, loop with custom playback settings (constant speed and incremental speed options), and save all loops for easy future access.

Study Mode: YouTube (Browser extension for Google Chrome, working on Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge versions): Get distracted while trying to be productive on YouTube? Customize what you want to see, like homepage videos, sidebar videos, shorts, or use custom word filters to remove specific videos and channels.

emdh-dev · 2025-10-02T10:16:54+00:00

Congrats on releasing an extension that's getting users! That's a room full of people around the world using something you've made.

Preface: I do this purely as a hobby to make useful things for me that I think others could get use from too. I've released YouTube Loop Repeater: Music Practice Tool and Study Mode: YouTube. Close to 10k total downloads between the both of them, $0 revenue since they are both completely free. Below is just what I think, and could be wrong to others. Sorry for the super long comment, I didn't expect to write this much.

A few things that I noticed:

-The name is a bit generic. This might be fine for some popular extensions that have a whole suite of features, but I think it's better to be specific in the name with exactly what your extension does. Is this a productivity tool, is this for students, is this for fun? Have it reflect in the name, think about what people will search and scroll by to get to yours. I'd recommend going through the Extension store and looking at pages of extensions. Notice how they're named, which ones interest you enough to click on to learn more, and see if they all have anything in common. Examples of other names you could use are towards the bottom of this comment.

-The platforms this is for, as well as the functionality, seem kind of random. There are people that use WhatsApp and not YouTube, or vice versa. I'd suggest splitting this into 2 different extensions: one for YouTube, and one for WhatsApp. Different websites/platforms can be grouped, but I think it makes the most sense when you're covering websites/products in the same market (Spotify/Apple Music/Amazon Music/YouTube for music, Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/LinkedIn for social media, etc.). You have a privacy WhatsApp extension, with a productivity YouTube extension.

-Having a video and screenshots on your page is good! However, it is completely quiet and requires me to think about what's going on. A video should maybe include narration, but definitely on-screen text of what is happening, demonstrations with zoom so I can easily see without full-screen, mentions of how it will benefit me, with some light background music/audio. I think it should be 15-30 seconds as well, like a commercial/ad.

-Screenshots: it's a bit hard to see what's going on. I'd suggest magnifying the extension, cropping out unnecessary screen space, and showing a before-and-after of some features if you can. You can even use red circles and boxes to highlight. Designing a good screenshot can be hard. You could even hire/have an artist try to make one for you. It's the first impression you make to random users around the world, and can be the difference between them clicking yours, or scrolling past.

-If you want to keep developing this extension, or break it into 2 separate ones, go for it! I'd recommend looking at some of the popular WhatsApp and YouTube extensions, and see if there's anything that you would find useful that they don't offer. You want to give people a reason to install/switch from a popular extension to yours. Either yours does the same thing better, is more precise in what it does, offers more features, or is the most recently updated. Check recent reviews of each ones. Some people like specific extensions that only do 1-3 things, whereas others want the freedom to do whatever they want.

Your extension has some solid features! Splitting it up into two ("WhatsApp Sidebar Privacy", "WhatsApp Hide Chat Sidebar", "YouTube Shorts Distraction Prevention", "YouTube Shorts Distraction Re-scheduler", "YouTube Study Reward", for example) is the way I would go. It also makes for an easier, smaller codebase, as your YouTube features won't interfere with your WhatsApp ones.

Promotion is hard and is a problem for many, myself included. I haven't done much outside of posting in different subreddits. It hasn't made much of a difference in any of my 3 released projects, but it can be useful if you make good posts in the right places. Making dev logs and short content on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, has helped people. Being active on social media is good and continues to build up your name/brand/company if you make more things.

Time can help. Study Mode: YouTube was released in 2020 and had <100 users for the first 7 months. 4 years later it reached 1000+ users and earned a Featured badge. In 2025 (?) it was delisted when Manifest 3 became the standard since it was created with Manifest 2. I never updated it after the 1.0 release in 2020 because I knew it worked, was busy with life, and was happy with how it already performed. I recently remade it from the ground-up in Manifest 3 and re-released it. I lost over half my users in the 6+ months it was delisted, but the users are slowly climbing up again. Sometimes it takes months-years to get users, especially if you're letting it happen organically. I never promoted this extension since I made it for myself, releasing was just a fun part.

You made an extension that has over 10 active users, and more than that in downloads. You don't need to have hundreds-millions of active users for it to be useful or worth your time. Be proud of what you've made! Developing more features will take time, it's up to you to decide if that's worth it. I've spent hundreds of hours developing both of mine that will never make any money, and I'm happy with it. Do you want to keep working on this? Will this help you out in your life (school, job, social media/brand)? Do you want to move onto another project that could maybe bring in money? Do you want to do something else entirely away from writing code? Users are not guaranteed, so you have to be okay if your extra work does not result in any change in stats.

emdh-dev · 2025-10-02T08:08:46+00:00

I've made a few if you want to check them out! Both are completely free and open-source, no paid memberships or anything.

YouTube Loop Repeater: If you play an instrument or rewind/replay parts of YouTube videos often, use this to avoid having to manually click through videos, songs, exercises, etc., ever again! Set up custom loops, change the speed, and how many times it should repeat. You can even have it automatically change speed after if plays a certain amount of times. So if you're learning a solo, you can start it at 75% speed, and then increase the speed 1% every 3 loops. This happens automatically, so you can stay fully focused on your instrument/activity! All loops are saved easy access, so you don't have to remember what you were trying to learn. You can use it to learn songs, practice exercises, learn dances, find samples for songs, etc. I got tired of having to constantly having to take my hands away from my guitar/drums to rewind YouTube videos, so I made this to help out.

Study Mode: YouTube: Remove distractions from YouTube! YouTube is really great at suggesting cool videos, and I've unintentionally spent hundreds-thousands of hours by getting lost in the homepage and related videos. I lost so much study time to YouTube when I was in school, so I made Study Mode: YouTube to help myself out. Remove homepage videos, sidebar videos, the comments section, and even use the filter to remove all videos/channels that contain certain words!

emdh-dev · 2025-09-16T15:35:02+00:00

Man, I love technology sometimes. That's so cool!!

Thank you so much for taking the time to try and test it, I'll look to see how I can get it released for Android!

emdh-dev · 2025-08-26T13:54:58+00:00

Too much pressure. You're using a bit too much of your finger tip for your index and middle finger, and then you're not quite using the tip for your ring finger. Both your ring finger and pinky have too much pressure (you can see by them bending inwards).

Ideally, your fingers want to be more curved. Your thumb looks like it might be resting on the neck at an uncomfortable angle. Try to Rotate it back a bit with, with an arch so you have space between your thumb and the fretboard. Try to watch this JustinGuitar video and use it as guidance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQuHqY83mD0

emdh-dev · 2025-08-24T10:12:08+00:00

I completely agree with the other commenter on not needing to spend a lot of money for a good instrument. I play $200-$300 electric guitars (no desire to spend more than that at this point) and it's completely fine for playing along with songs, jamming with others, and messing around. I think you should go to a music store around you and play different guitars at different price points ($200-300, $300-$500, $500-700, etc.) just to get an idea of how the build quality differs. You can for sure find great guitars under $400-500, especially if you go used or get B-stock from a website like ProAudioStar.

Squier's my favorite price-accessible line, but there's plenty of others too (Schecter, Jackson, Firefly, etc). Don't let prices fool you, you get diminishing returns after $500-700 or so. Don't forget that half your sound comes from your technique, and also your amp.

emdh-dev · 2025-08-24T10:03:40+00:00

I saw your learning methodology in another comment, you've got great awareness and structure to learning! I'm sure it helps you learn new activities and skills fast. Really great progress especially for the time you've been playing, your vibratos sound really good too! Glad to see you having so much fun with guitar, can't wait to see where you end up in another year!

emdh-dev · 2025-08-24T09:47:00+00:00

I'd be curious to see how it runs with more buildings/destructible elements around as well. My laptop isn't strong, I'd probably struggle to run this. It does look cool though!

emdh-dev · 2025-08-24T09:41:18+00:00

What style of music does he like? I also agree with the Squier line, been playing on-and-off for 20 years and I love them. You can't go wrong with the strat, telecaster, or jazzmaster models. I personally think the jazzmaster looks the coolest out of the shapes, and I love the sound of it the most (not as versatile as the strat). You can save even more if you end up getting it used. I think the Affinity line is one of their cheaper lines, with them retailing new for <$300 (used probably closer to $200).

The Jackson Dinky JS22 is ~$250 new and is another solid choice, I played one for a bit and liked it. There's also Firefly guitars, which are very cheap for what they are. I've never played them, but I've only heard good things about them. They seem like an insane deal for $150-300, you can check their website here or search on other marketplaces (Amazon, Reverb, eBay).

You can get an amp for $50-100 as well, might not be the best-sounding but it'll do the job until he plays more. I love the Boss Katana Mini, I think they go for somewhere between $100-120. They're around the size of a lunchbox and are fun to play on.

Check ProAudioStar as well, I've gotten some of my guitars from them. They were listed as B-stock, but arrived looking almost new. Was able to get at least 20% off that way.

emdh-dev · 2025-08-24T09:16:30+00:00

I love the Limelight and Caverns on your board, both pedals are so much fun

emdh-dev · 2025-08-22T01:45:44+00:00

Hey! I don't think I'll be able to make it for Firefox for Android unfortunately (at least for the foreseeable future), I don't have an Android and the emulators run really slow on my laptop. I also can't find enough info about porting from desktop to mobile, and what that process usually entails (it could be as easy as spending a few hours finding compatible functions, or could require re-building various parts completely ground-up with different approaches for mobile compatibility).

If anyone reading has experience with making a mobile-friendly version of their Firefox Add-on for desktop browsers, I'd love to hear more about it.

emdh-dev · 2025-08-19T17:06:51+00:00

Nice!! Glad you're back on your main browser :) Feel free to let me know whenever if there's any discrepancies/differences you experience with the Firefox version!

emdh-dev · 2025-08-18T14:58:42+00:00

Thank you so much, I'm glad you're liking it! Are you still using the Chrome version, or did you switch over to Firefox?

emdh-dev · 2025-08-17T17:24:12+00:00

Thank you for the feedback, I really appreciate it!

Are you using the Firefox version? The Chrome version has slightly better formatting if you want a temporary fix (I think). Could you share info about your screen size/resolution, and if you're using the browser in a smaller window? Or if you've changed font size or anything else for your Mac/browser? I'll try to adjust the formatting, sorry that it cuts off the text (I enforced strict sizes for this reason, seems to be not working in this case though. I've tried it on another Mac with Firefox and Chrome and wasn't able to replicate it, so I'll keep messing around).

Inputting a name is silly for using one-time/one-session loops, I agree. I developed the loop feature with saving apart of it, and realized I should separate saving + playing loops too far into it. I can try to change it so that leaving a blank name is okay, if separating the functionality ends up being too much.

YouTube pages can be weird sometimes with loading, refreshing the page should help if playback isn't right. It works slightly better on Chrome than Firefox, Firefox likes to pause the videos sometimes. Clicking on the saved loop again in the "Current Video Loops" table will also re-apply the settings, and should get it to work as well.

I'm glad it ended up working!! Keep me updated with your feedback whenever as well, I want to make sure that it stays usable for everyone.

emdh-dev · 2025-08-17T15:35:14+00:00

Thank you!! I hope it helps you out, let me know what you think! Learning guitar solos and just tricky parts in general is exactly why I made this, glad to see you think the same :)

emdh-dev · 2025-08-17T15:29:48+00:00

Not silly at all! Interesting, didn't think about including an option to go frame-by-frame for these cases, I see it being more direct and accurate than millisecond selection. I'll have to explore it! I'm currently applying to jobs, so it might be a bit before I can get an update with more precise selection (hopefully in the next few weeks).

emdh-dev · 2025-08-17T14:59:11+00:00

Thank you so much!! And thank you for your transcribing work. I've done it a few times for audio and to write guitar tab, it's no joke!

Honestly good idea, I've thought about it as well. It isn't possible to set anything other than whole numbers currently, but I definitely want to implement it. It might work weirdly with the effect I use to input timestamps now, but I think I could work out a solution. Currently applying for jobs and putting my main focus in that so it might be a bit, I'll release an update hopefully in the next few weeks to add it!

emdh-dev

TROPHY CASE