Falcon immensely enhances the user experience on OWL. With Falcon, OWL loads over 65% faster on average. Falcon also improves the visual layout of OWL (including styling of buttons, forms, etc.) Falcon operates completely on the front-end and has no connection to the back-end.

Falcon is available for install on the Chrome Web Store, and is coming soon for Mozilla Firefox and Safari.

Falcon enhances the OWL experience and offers many new features that are not available on OWL. Some of the features are highlighted below:

When you navigate OWL, it will be much faster because a full refresh is not done every time you go to a new page. (This feature is disabled on Gradebook, Test/Quizzes, and Forum)

Especially useful when you're just starting a new semester, and you're not used to the course codes yet.

The new resources page is extremely fast and offers an instant file-browsing experience. No more full page refresh just to browse folders. And if for any reason you need to access the old resources system, you are just one click away.

Falcon includes a new editor which you can use to create flow charts, diagrams, and more. Each course gets its own editor and changes are saved instantly. You can also export your diagrams as PNG, JPG or SVG.

OWL offers sorting of announcements, assignments, etc. but it takes a full page refresh just to sort, making it an awful experience. Falcon sorts instantly while allowing you to search instantly. Falcon also allows you to search tables, too.

OWL currently has no checks in place to ensure that a resource is not loaded more than once. This results in many libraries and packages being requested multiple times. Falcon will soon resolve this issue.

Of course, the features listed here are the main features you can visually interact with / see on OWL. There are many minor enhancements to OWL itself that Falcon makes that improves the user experience. One of which is a more modern and updated look without taking away from the OWL you are familiar with.

Falcon is available on the Chrome Web Store for easy install.

You can also install it manually as well. It's pretty straight forward!

1. Clone or download this project as a Zip file, and extract it
2. Go to chrome://extensions and toggle on Developer Mode on the top right
3. On the same page, you should now see three new buttons. Click on the Load unpacked button and choose the extracted folder
4. That's it! Falcon is now running!

If there are any updates, then you will need to manually re-install it. However, once it's available on the Chrome store, updating Falcon is just like updating any other Chrome extensions.

Falcon was built with security in mind. Using Falcon does not compromise the security of OWL. In fact, it enhances certain security elements of OWL, particularly in the case of POST-based browsing.

Falcon works on top of OWL, and it makes no external requests to any external endpoints (with the exception of asset files). Falcon also does not collect any inputs, form data, session data, or any other relevant information. You are free to inspect the source code!

If you run into any issues, then I'd really appreciate it if you could either create a new issue here or email me at [email protected].

If you encounter any issues that prevent you from using OWL normally, please disable or uninstall Falcon until it is fixed.

Feel free to fork it / create a pull request! If you have any questions, ideas, or concerns, please send them over to [email protected] or create a new issue .

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2021 RishabSwift

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

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