23++ Chrome Extension updated for Relative Finder v2

Posted on 3rd July 2011 by admin

The promised Relative Finder changes are now upon us and as expected the RF features in the extension had to be largely re-written to work with the new interface.

The good news is that this is complete! As 23andMe have failed to implement any of the extension’s features themselves all the original features have been restored:

  • Auto-matching of surnames
  • Addition of country flags
  • MRCA estimate
  • Calculation of cM shared
  • Date pending communications were sent
  • Age calculation

In addition I have made a number of cosmetic changes which I hope make the interface clearer – my intention being to make the important things stand out, which they don’t by default:

  • Your total number of matches is now more prominent
  • No more small grey text
  • Profile pictures are made bigger
  • Match names are made bigger and bold
  • Predicted relationship is made bold
  • The contact status column is colour-coded based on contact status
  • You sometimes get empty boxes if users don’t enter surnames or places correctly, these are hidden

23pp_rf

As always there has also been some minor bug fixes and optimisations behind-the-scenes. If you already have the extension you’ll get the new version (v1.8.0) automatically, if not head to the download page.

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23++ Chrome Extension v1.7.1 released

Posted on 23rd June 2011 by admin

There’s nothing terribly exciting in this release, it primarily adds some optimisations behind-the-scenes and fixes some minor bugs. With the forthcoming update of Relative Finder (23andMe login required), I decided to add some code to disable the 23++ Relative Finder features on release day. While I wouldn’t expect anything untoward to happen, it’s cleaner if the features are initially disabled until I have time to review the new interface and decide what features I need to keep and which are no longer required. No doubt they will all require rewriting to work correctly with the new interface anyway.

If you’ve already got the extension you’ll get the update automatically, if not head to the download page.

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If you like 23++, you might like…

Posted on 31st May 2011 by admin

Browsing the as-yet-untranscribed 1911 UK census available on Ancestry the other day, I got tired of clicking and scrolling through hundreds of pages just to find the one I wanted (having found the right registration district in the summary books). So naturally I wrote a browser extension to do it for me… well, it started out as a way to browse through the 1911 census, then every collection on every Ancestry site…

So now I can sit back and watch the records scroll by without getting RSI. Typically now that I’ve written it there’s no more records I want to find, but maybe it’ll save other people some time…

If you want to try it, you can get it from the Chrome Web Store.

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23++ Chrome Extension 1.7 released

Posted on 16th May 2011 by admin

Hot on the heels of 1.6, I have today released version 1.7 of the 23++ Chrome extension.

This release extends the enhanced messaging functionality to Sent and Archived messages and adds the ability to archive messages in bulk.

A small change, but the extension now calculates age from birth year on user’s profile pages.

It may not look like much, but the messaging features represent many hours of work – I probably won’t be doing any more releases for a while! It seems to have been appreciated though, since there were 40% more downloads of the last release (343 in total) compared to the previous one.

As always, if you’ve already installed the extension you’ll get the update automatically, if not you can get it from the download page.

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Breakdown of 23++ downloads by country

Posted on 2nd May 2011 by admin

Someone was asking in the 23andMe forums today about the make-up of the 23andMe customer base – the impression most people get is that their customers are predominantly from the US. I figured that if I check where users downloading this extension are from, they will be broadly indicative of the 23andMe customer base.

23++ Downloads by country

No massive surprises here! Of the 509 unique downloads of the extension since time began, 70.3% of those were from the US. Following some way behind is the UK at 6.1%.

23++ Downloads by continent

If we break it down by continent, we see that North America accounts for 73.5% of downloads, with Europe some way behind with 19.6%. There were no downloads from Africa in my sample.

23++ European DownloadsIf we focus on Europe only, we can see that the most downloads were from the UK, followed by Germany. Scandinavia is quite well represented, the Southern Europe figures seem low.

So what can we surmise from this rather unscientific analysis of a small sample? Not a whole lot, except that the 23andMe customer base looks to still be dominated by the US, although Europe isn’t too far behind. Other populations are still very under-represented, which is a shame. Maybe all 23andMe need to do is translate their website into a few different languages – I wouldn’t much fancy trying to understand such a complicated subject in a language I don’t speak natively!

Edit: some downloads were accidentally excluded from my analysis. I’ve updated the charts and figures to include these – Australia is now represented!

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