Show HN: Google Meet Studio Mini – Change your appearance with a browser script | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Google Meet Studio Mini – Change your appearance with a browser script

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61 pointsxingyzt12 comments

This looks like pretty clear trademark infringement to me, unless you work for Google and I think that's unlikely.

I'm surprised Google lets anyone post a Chrome extension with a title beginning with "Google".

You’re probably right, but seeing that Google Meet isn’t enforcing its trademark on extensions used by tens thousands of people (“Google Meet Grid View”, “Google Meet Enhancement Suite”, “Google Meet Push to Talk”, etc), I’ll just keep the name.

Besides trademark confusion, there is also just plain confusion. For someone who hasn't seen it before, things get confusing when when the same product has multiple names. What do I call it? Which name is the important one? You don't want people to have to think about that.

Is "Mercator Studio" another name for your product? Why make people remember multiple names?

Something like "Mercator Mini Studio for Google Meet" would make sense if you want people to remember "Mercator" and search for that.

The code can be readily adapted for other web services that use the MediaDevices API, so I didn’t want to tie the name down to Google Meet. On the other hand, having a unique name is counterproductive to an extension which is dependent on another service. People search for Google Meet; I’d have to try a lot harder to get them to remember Mercator. “Mercator Studio for Google Meet” sounds like a fair compromise though. I’ll think about that.

I'd be careful. On August 27, they're getting stricter on spam https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/spam-faq so don't be surprised if they start cracking down on this as well.

"...for Google Meet" will probably be okay. They have specific examples like that here: https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/branding

Got it. Thank you both for the warning :]

Neat! This would be pretty useful to me if the settings persisted between sessions -- I don't have the time to fine-tune my camera for each meeting, but if I could tune it once and use it again and again, that'd be worth it.

Implemented in 1.13.0. Update is pending review from the webstores.

The source is also available on GitHub https://github.com/FlyOrBoom/mercator

OMG I love this. This is like the photobooth application but for google meet. This needs to have the weird lens effects like fish eye.

feDisplacementMap [1] should work, although I have no idea how to make one, and Google Meet on Firefox is having problems with SVG filters [2].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/feD...

[2] https://github.com/FlyOrBoom/mercator/issues/2

Change the extension name. This is not an official Google product. The name is misleading.

e.g.: Mercator for Google Meet

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