Cape Canaveral

Chrome ext. to create one-click launchpads for sets of docs, resources and apps that you need to open up periodically. 4th mini-app vibe-coded in-house.

Four months, four apps. I have kept my promise. And I am not going to stop.

The new mini-app I am releasing today - Cape Canaveral - is a Chrome extension that makes it easy to create one-click launchpads for sets of documents, resources, websites and apps that you periodically need to open up.

Instead of having to remember and type these URLs each time you need them, you save each URL set inside a customizable widget. Then, when the time comes and you need to work with a certain set, you click the “Open All” magic button and they all open up instantly.

Like the other three previously released mini-apps (WebPage TimeDetector, CCPD Video Finder, Personal Tab), Cape Canaveral is freely accessible for all subscribers to anyone of my Substack newsletters (and to my Italian supporters on Patreon).

Why I Built It Cape Canaveral and What You Can Do With It

I built Cape Canaveral to fill a specific personal need: To create launchpads for sets of documents, apps and online resources that I need to open periodically.

Imagine me consulting with a number of clients on their digital communication strategy and having to periodically meet them to look at their published work, to analyze their progress and to plan future strategies and the next steps.

In these online meetings I need to rapidly access small sets of documents, websites and social media channels that are relevant to each specific client.

For example: One or two Google Docs relevant to our project, their Substack and LinkedIN channels, their social media management account and the publishing platform through which I supervise their website content.

To speed up this task and to make sure that I do not forget to open all the documents and websites I need, I would normally save all of these tabs into a browser tab manager like OneTab or Tablerone. Then when the day of our next meeting would come, I’d access the browser tab manager, look for the last session saved with that customer, and re-open all those tabs in a new window before starting to work.

Now, with Cape Canaveral, everything is simpler, cleaner and safer too.

With Cape Canaveral installed in my Chrome browser I can create as many mini-launchpads / widgets as my clients are, and just click one button to open all of the relevant document and websites needed for my next session.

Here some other examples of how Cape Canaveral and launchpads can be useful:

a) Doing Content Research
To prepare for something I want to write and that requires some background research, I always want to have ready and open a few selected search engines, my big directory of content resources, Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, STORM, Perplexity and Internet.io.

b) Designing Visual Communication
Same story for when I work with images and I need to create or find a visual for a story, a cover or for a social media post. For this task I need to have open my favorite graphic apps, free image catalogs, one or two AI image generators, BGSub for background removal, Google Slides for layout and composition, Raugen Tools for file conversions and Topaz Labs for upscaling and improving definition and image details.

c) Roasting Customer Websites
One other frequent task I run is to critically analyze online content resources (websites, landing pages, social media channels, etc.) while providing practical suggestions and ideas on how to improve them. To support this task I need: a tool to record the screen, a graphic canvas on which to place screenshot and annotations, GTMetrix to measure website speed, a SEO analytics tool, and a new Google Doc to write down notes.

d) Checking Out My Sport Team News
Since I was a little kid I have been a diehard AS Roma soccer fan and to this day, watching its matches, checking out the news and updates or listening to one of the many Rome radio stations covering this infinite novel 24-hrs non stop, is a source of healthy distraction for my brain. And so, whenever distraction time strikes, I have a launchpad that in one-click opens up all of these sources, sounds and images that make me still feel like a little kid in love with his heroes team.

How Cape Canaveral Came To Be

For my fourth mini-app I had in mind something completely different than what I ended up doing.

My plan was to build AI Recorder, a web app and/or browser extension that would allow me to record audio interviews with the ChatGPT voice assistant.

The idea came to me as, having had many good conversations with ChatGPT voice assistant, I thought how interesting it could have been to organize podcast-style interview questions where AI would pose me critical, difficult questions on a specified topic (without me knowing them ahead of time), and to use these recordings as valuable audio content.

I knew this was an ambitious project. In the past I had already challenged myself with recording both microphone and the computer system audio and had learned that this is something not as easy and simple as one would imagine.

Up until not long ago, the tech setup to do this required installing special os-level audio drivers and configuring them for this application. Apparently simple, but a tad too complicated for a typical non-technical user.

Unfortunately, as soon as I started vibe coding AI Recorder, I realized that the troubleshooting part was full of surprises and issues. I needed more time to explore and test, as much as some assistance from someone more technically-savvy than me to overcome the many unforeseen bumps.

Since my precious tech advisor, my nephew Nico, has recently been too busy to even exchange a few messages asynchronously, I decided to put AI Recorder on the backburner and to go after the one key feature I hadn’t been able to integrate inside my third mini-app (Personal Tab) before it started exploding on me: launchpads.

But the problem with Personal Tab and integrating launchpads was that I had somehow reached a limit with the code I was generating with Bolt, and whenever I tried to add anything more to the app, the whole feature set would dissolve. Bolt would try to guess and rebuild the whole thing from scratch but the results were as though it had completely forgotten all we had done up to that point.

That’s why I decided to give up on adding the launchpads and to release Personal Tab without that specific feature. The app already had many useful functions and could have lived just fine without this extra feature.

How To Use Cape Canaveral

To use Cape Canaveral is very simple.

You install the Chrome extension and once it is pinned next to your browser address bar, you click its icon once every time you want to access your launchpads.

To create new launchpads / widgets, you simply click on the widget that says “Create new widget” and you start adding to it the URLs of the websites, resources and apps that you need to open up periodically.

Launchpad widgets are fully customizable: you can edit and customize their name, the order and labels of the items listed, and the widget position inside the Cape Canaveral canvas.

It is also possible to save all of the widgets you have created and their linked contents into a file for backup purposes or to move all your launchpads from one computer to another.

*There is a light/dark mode tiny switch at the bottom right of the Cape Canaveral page for those preferring a black background instead of the default one.

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How To Get It

Cape Canaveral is freely downloadable for all my Premium subscribers to Good Tools, Curation Monetized and TRUST-able.

• Installation instructions are here below in the Premium section

• If you are a TRUST-able premium subscriber send me a direct message to get immediate access.

P.S.: If you are not among my Premium subscribers, do not want to start paying for a premium subscription but are seriously interested in trying out Cape Canaveral, let me hear your voice.

Just reply to this email or click the message button here below and I’ll be listening.

If there are enough of you, wanting to get these mini-apps for one low lifetime price, I will be happy to find a way to make this possible.