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GENESIS I

Anping Huang

Focus

USA

Completed in

2023

Now, here’s our incredible 3rd-place winner feature article on Focus by Anping Huang!

Anping drew inspiration for the project "Focus" from the recent surge in global screen time, a trend largely fueled by the addictive nature of social media platforms. Acknowledging the adverse impact on productivity and overall well-being, Huang aimed to offer an effective solution that addresses the root cause of excessive screen time. The focus was on finding a balanced approach that mitigates the negative effects of addictive digital content while preserving the educational side of platforms like YouTube.

By recognizing the nuanced challenge posed by increasing screen time, "Focus" seeks to provide users with a thoughtful tool to cultivate healthier digital habits without compromising the educational value offered by online platforms.

What's the awesome stuff?

CareerShield is a multi-faceted platform designed to promote job accessibility and safety for the youth. Upon signing up, the website's job application feature suggests relevant job opportunities based on users' interests. But what sets it apart is its commitment to providing crucial information about potential employers, such as workplace culture, leadership, long-term stability, and discrimination and harassment data. These features encourage companies and businesses to promote higher and stronger workplace standards.

Distraction-Free YouTube Experience: Focus transforms the YouTube interface by eliminating the recommended page, replacing it with a clean and focused search bar. This intentional design shift directs users back to their original purpose, reducing the likelihood of falling into the trap of endless scrolling and distractions.
Default Blocking for Non-Educational Platforms: The extension goes beyond YouTube, offering default blocking for non-educational social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Users can further customize these settings through an intuitive dashboard, tailoring the extension to align with their specific productivity goals.
Intuitive Dashboard for Customization: Focus prioritizes user control with an intuitive dashboard, allowing individuals to customize their experience based on their unique preferences. This feature enables users to strike a balance between staying connected and maintaining a focused digital environment.
Integrated Ad-Blocker: Recognizing the impact of intrusive ads on productivity, Focus incorporates an integrated ad-blocker. This feature removes distracting advertisements and connects to popular adblockers like UBlock Origin, contributing to a seamless and unobtrusive online experience. The integrated ad-blocker also has specific levels, such as "basic" and "optimal" to give a sense of personalization to the user for their needs. We also noticed that this could help fix issues with common ad-blockers, such as accidentally blocking non-intrustive elements on a page.
Free and Open-Source: As a commitment to accessibility and transparency, Focus is offered as a free and open-source Chrome extension. This aligns with the project's ethos of providing users with a powerful productivity tool without any financial barriers, fostering a community-driven approach to digital well-being.
The Pitch: Although not a part of the solution, we'd like to give a special shoutout to Anping's incredible video editing. At just 16 years old, we thought he was a full-fledged YouTuber! With such a professional and charismatic video, it was impossible to not note his natural talent for design and scriptwriting.

Oops, got distracted. What happened?

The development of the Focus had challenges, especially given Anping's unfamiliarity extension development.

Primarily, navigating through the intricacies of manifest.json, a pivotal element in extension creation, proved to be a learning curve, requiring a deep technical understanding for seamless integration.

Further exploration also revealed challenges in efficiently accessing and manipulating elusive elements on web pages, prompting the adoption of a strategic and methodical approach to surmount these technical obstacles.

However, Anping found himself with what EQ Hacks calls a technical masterpiece. In just 8 days and 8 hours, he ended with a stronger understanding of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Along with that, he utilized many technical sources to help him along his journey—we love resourceful participants!

“I encountered various challenges and leveraged resources like Stack Overflow, articles, and YouTube tutorials to overcome them."

The F in Focus is for Future. Which we really hope there is one.

In the future, Focus aims to expand its accessibility and reach by pursuing a release on the Chrome Web Store. This strategic move is designed to make the extension readily available to a broader audience of millions of Chrome users.

Additionally, the project has plans to extend its compatibility by developing versions tailored for non-chromium browsers, ensuring a more inclusive application of the productivity tool. This is especially noteworthy for us, since many of our judges and team members at EQ Hacks use browsers like Safari or Firefox!

We hope Anping will continue his tech journey and wish him the best of luck on his coding journey!