Glaze

New in 3.0.1: Look → Surfaces controls content-panel opacity, blur, palette/custom color, accent/course tint, shadow strength/color, frost, depth and borders. Panels, native content rows, navigation, menus, tooltips and Glaze’s own apps share those controls across Blackboard Ultra, Canvas and Moodle. Surface backgrounds follow the Look’s corner radius. Automatic defaults retain each Look’s existing fills; custom transparency needs blur and a non-solid background. Small rows get no additional backdrop blur.

Animated pets: the optional habitat keeps its existing XP and decorations. Choose Ember the fox, Luna the owl, Mochi the cat, Sprout the dragon, Pebble the capybara, Rime the arctic fox or the animated Glaze droplet, or import a local ChatGPT pet under Study tools → Pet habitat. Choose its pet.json and PNG/WebP sprite sheet together, a ZIP containing them, or the sprite sheet alone. Existing v1 (1536 × 1872) and v2 (1536 × 2288) sheets are supported; v2 adds sixteen gaze directions. Click a pet to wave, or focus it and press Enter/Space to jump. Animation pauses offscreen and in hidden pages, and reduced motion or Glaze Motion off shows a still frame. No account connection, pet service or upload is needed.

Optional share sessions: open Share sessions in settings, Ctrl/⌘K, Notes or To Do. Nothing connects until you create, join or resume. Share selected notes/a folder (including encrypted pictures and attachments), your current Look, or selected custom tasks with their steps and plans. Paste invites into Glaze rather than opening them in a web page. Anyone holding an edit invite can edit; a view invite can only read. Joining keeps a separate local copy; explicitly copy into a chosen local account to add new items. An editable copy follows updates; a viewer's copy is detached. A Look changes your theme only after Use this Look opens the existing editor preview and you apply it.

While a shared surface is open, changes sync through https://share.frostdev.io by default, end-to-end encrypted, with catch-up on reopening. Pause sharing stops connections; Glaze and your local copies still work without the relay. Leave this device forgets its keys; only the creator can delete the session from the relay. App copies remain. Sessions stay until deleted unless the creator opts into deletion after a year unused. The device list shows self-chosen editing-device names and last-seen times, not verified identities; view-only devices cannot announce themselves. Pause, Leave and Delete remain available while a sync is busy; old queued updates cannot reconnect afterward.

Share sessions → Relay can select a custom HTTPS origin, or HTTP localhost/127.0.0.1 for local testing. Saving only changes the synced preference for new sessions; existing sessions and backup keys keep their own server. Test connection explicitly checks /health with a five-second timeout and never enables sharing. Joining a custom-server invite first names the host and asks for confirmation in Glaze, before permission checks or connections. Restoring custom keys stays offline until Resume confirms any new hosts. Custom operators receive encrypted data and metadata under their own policies; Glaze cannot vouch for them. See Run your own relay for Node/Docker, TLS proxies, disk/R2 storage, limits, backups and updates.

Notes Export all and Import open Glaze's own backup page. Both notes ZIPs and settings backups always include all share keys and creator delete tokens, even while sharing is paused: anyone with the backup can open those sessions and may change or delete them. Keep backups private. Restoring keys does not connect; resume explicitly. After a relay restore, Re-upload retained files sends this device's retained bytes encrypted again and publishes fresh references. Missing local bytes cannot be recreated. Caps are 20 sessions, 200 selected notes/tasks, 16 MiB session state, 64 MiB files per session and 200 MiB retained session files per device. Additional carriers need an optional adapter; arbitrary storage and LMS assignments are not shared.

Glaze is a Chrome and Safari extension that restyles Blackboard Ultra, Canvas and Moodle. It replaces the palette with one you control, reshapes the pages around it, and adds small helpers you can see at a glance. It works on any institution's Blackboard Ultra install, because every Ultra deployment lives under /ultra/ on its own domain, and on Canvas and Moodle, which Glaze recognizes on any school's domain.

Ultra's in-page route changes remain visible while Blackboard builds them. Only the initial document paint can wait for Glaze's local stylesheets, with the existing one-second limit. If Glaze is reloaded while an LMS tab stays open, its old extension API work stops until that tab reloads too. Its animated scene also stops and releases its rendering resources.

Get it for Chrome · Download for Mac (Safari)

The settings editor has eight tabs: Look, Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, Study tools, Sharing and sync, Backup and privacy, and About. Search works across tabs; section links such as #blackboard/nav and older editor links reveal the right tab. Section resets change their own preferences; resetting preferences keeps your palettes, pictures, local notes/tasks, bookmarks and share keys. The live preview uses fictional local pages at real desktop or phone CSS widths, with site/page/appearance controls. Focusing a Blackboard course's editor controls previews that course's appearance; Blackboard nicknames can be edited here as well as on its course cards. Sharing and sync includes the Relay origin and an explicit connection test; saving stays offline.

Features

• Course cards as widgets on Ultra — opt in with Edit layout → + Course cards on Courses, or pick + Course card on the Dashboard. Each card moves, snaps, resizes, folds and removes like other tiles; each board keeps its own layout, up to 48 course cards per school. The cards start in the native list’s area, in course/term order. Show Ultra’s course list restores its search, filters and term picker; Show course cards returns to your tiles. Removing every course card or hiding the board restores the native list. Cards reuse loaded metadata, grades, progress, new-work badges, bookmarks and stored tasks; unavailable data stays absent until the existing readers answer. No extra course, gradebook or planner request is made.

• Blackboard Ultra appearance — the Courses page shares Canvas’s card editor and appearance settings: colors, gradients, pictures, crop, filters and overlay; grid sizing, condensed cards, hover effects, particles and pets. Open a course card's Glaze menu, then Card style and bookmarks. In Ultra list view, banner styles and corners apply; row dimensions and labels stay native. The global navigation shares Canvas's background, label and size controls, with contrast checks in the editor. Ultra's document viewer stays native pending a verified viewer origin and safe integration.

• Blackboard global widgets — a widget you choose to float stays available across Blackboard pages, including the native Institution tab, with one copy. It keeps clear of either navigation rail, course tab strips and the footer; a small window gets a scrolling stack. The Dashboard's own layout stays separate.

• Palettes — six presets, 14 colour tokens, your own saved palettes, and automatic light/dark palettes that follow the system or a schedule (dark from 20:00 to 08:00, say). Keep quizzes light (off by default) leaves quizzes you're taking and external tools such as New Quizzes unthemed on Canvas.

• Look — fonts for text, headings and code (two bundled; about forty more from Google Fonts and Nerd Fonts, or any Google Font by name, each previewed in its own face), text size, line height, corner radius, density, depth and glass.

• Backgrounds — solid; a gradient you shape (linear, radial, conic or mesh; angle, blend, spread); a drifting aurora; your own image; or ten slow animated scenes (three.js, drawn at low resolution; two for Halloween, a moonlit graveyard and a pumpkin patch) with one Intensity slider. Palette colors or your own.

• Motion — Off, Subtle or Expressive. Reduced-motion users get Off automatically.

• Course colors — every course its own color, from Ultra's stripes blended into your palette or set one by one, on course pages, Messages, Grades and the calendar.

• Tooltips and hints — themed tooltips. Hover a date for how far off it is, a grade for its share.

• Extras — score bars, due-date status ("in 2 days · Unopened", "Submitted", "Submitted late", "Graded · 18/20") and grade percentages, folder previews, course progress, new-grade and new-content badges, a what-if grade calculator that keeps your scores, a Ctrl+K command palette for courses, items, pages, settings and what's due this week (also in the popup) that also searches your courses on Canvas and Ultra, remembering your place in a course's content, a backup of what you type in Blackboard's editors, Download all, which saves a folder's files as one zip, and focus mode for course documents (on by default); due-date urgency, shorter descriptions, reading width, keyboard shortcuts, dark documents (dimmed or inverted) and hiding page parts you don't use (off by default).

• On Canvas — the same extras, each where Canvas keeps the same thing: progress, previews, new-item badges, your place and Download all on Modules; score bars and percentages on Grades and Assignments; due-date status and urgency on Assignments, Modules and To Do; tint, a Look per course and card grades on the Dashboard (click one for the course's grades, or keep them hidden until you point at the card); draft backup for new Inbox messages to individual users in uniquely named courses. A what-if calculator above a course's grades works out your grade by Canvas's own rules (weights, dropped scores, excused work, grading periods) and matches Canvas's totals: change real scores, leave work out, add pretend assignments and see what you'd need for a target. It keeps what you change on your device until the real grade arrives, and never writes to Canvas. An optional GPA on the Dashboard gives your term and cumulative GPA on a 4.0 or plus/minus scale, weighted for honors and AP if you like, with credits, a grading scale and a what-if grade per course. Add your past terms by hand or from a transcript: its text, a PDF, a photo or screenshot, a web page or a Word file (read on your device and shown for review first; pass/fail, withdrawn and transfer courses are listed but not counted) for an overall GPA, a trend chart with the same figures as a table, and a goal: what this term needs, and one way there from your grades now, with the lowest percent for each letter and what each course's work left needs. Kept on your device; Ctrl+K opens it. Where Canvas has its own (editor recovery, course nicknames and colors, folder zips, unread counts), Glaze leaves it to Canvas, themed; Canvas's own what-if scores still work beside Glaze's. Course progress counts module completion requirements, so a course without any shows no bar.

• Grades on Blackboard Ultra — the same what-if calculator, under a course's overall grade: by the course's own overall-grade recipe where Ultra gives it to students (checked first against Blackboard's own figure), otherwise an estimate from your share of the points in graded work, shown beside Blackboard's figure and marked as one. Scores typed in Glaze's earlier Ultra calculator move over. The GPA, with past terms, trends and a goal, sits on Ultra's Grades page for this term's courses; where Blackboard doesn't show a course's letter cut-offs, Glaze uses your scale for it (typed, or from its syllabus) or a common one. Syllabus import is on a course's outline and reads a document in the course, a file or pasted text; Insights opens from the Courses page or Ctrl+K.

• Insights (Canvas and Blackboard, off by default) — your term in numbers, from a button on the Dashboard or Ctrl+K: the share of work you handed in on time per course, each course's grade over the term as a sparkline, the work due each week with the busiest weeks ahead, how often your Better To Do plans were kept, and a summary card you can save as a picture. Every chart has a table beside it. Worked out on your device from your own Canvas; only a small summary of this term is kept there, until you clear it.

• Better To Do (Canvas and Blackboard, on by default) — Glaze's own To Do list in place of Canvas's on the Dashboard and a course's home page, and on Blackboard in place of the To Do on the Courses page and beside a course's content (that course only): grouped by day in your Canvas time zone (on Blackboard, your browser's) (past due, today, tomorrow, this week, later), with what's done, what's graded and announcements apart; a free custom timeframe; your own tasks, steps, a day to do something on and timed focus sessions, kept on your device; and, for teachers, work to grade with grading progress. Ticking can also mark the item done in Canvas's own planner, if you switch that on; on Blackboard a tick always stays on your device. Courses Canvas no longer lists as active (on Blackboard: hidden or closed courses) are left out; if the course list can't be loaded, every course shows rather than any being hidden. On Blackboard, work comes from its To Do list and calendar, with what you handed in, late, missing or excused from each course's gradebook; when Blackboard can't send its calendar whole, the list says some work may be missing.

• Export calendar (.ics) (Canvas and Blackboard) — from Better To Do's Export button or Ctrl+K: one file of your Canvas or Blackboard deadlines, your own tasks with a due date, your "do on" days and focus sessions (as events at their times) and, if you show it, your Gradescope work, for the next 2, 4, 8 or 16 weeks or the rest of the term. Import it into Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar yourself; each item keeps the same identifier, so importing a newer file updates it where the calendar supports that. Made on your device and saved by your browser; the file holds your course and assignment names.

• Google Calendar sync (Chrome, off until you connect) — keeps a calendar named Glaze in your Google account up to date with the same events and choices as the export, from Glaze's settings. Chrome signs you in with Google; Glaze asks only to manage calendars it makes (calendar.app.created), so it can't see or touch your other calendars. Deadlines, tasks and classes mirror Canvas and your schedule: edit one in Google and Glaze writes it back, delete one and it stays deleted. Move or delete a "do on" day or focus session in Google and the plan follows in Better To Do. No reminders on the events. Link another device shows a code to paste on your other computer, so both keep the one calendar; Disconnect revokes Glaze's access and can delete the calendar. It syncs from Canvas and Blackboard pages (on open, every 15 minutes, and soon after your plans change); there's no Glaze server, and requests go only to Google. Edge, Brave and Safari use the export; Outlook sync isn't here. It isn't in released builds yet: it's switched off at build time until Google verifies Glaze.

• Tasks on course cards (Canvas and Blackboard, off by default) — each Dashboard card (on Blackboard, each card on the Courses page) lists its course's next items (4 by default, up to 10, then how many more), soonest first, with the date and a status chip (submitted, graded, late, missing, excused); done items can stay crossed out. It follows Better To Do's timeframe and done rules and reuses its copy of your planner, on or off. The card grows to fit its list.

• Search in your courses (Canvas and Blackboard Ultra, on by default) — from two characters in Ctrl/⌘K, find titles in your courses, this course first, then this term's, up to 24 results. Ultra searches this course and open courses in this term, including released public text of documents, announcements and discussion topics, without opening posts or marking anything read. Unknown or unsupported release conditions are omitted. Content results use Ultra's own redirect; announcements and discussions open their course tool lists. Answers are reused for five minutes; bounded stale entries are evicted on later cache use and all search data is cleared when search or Glaze is switched off. Typing again or closing cancels pending requests. Ultra asks at most three lists at a time, 30 search requests per query and two pages (up to 400 items) per list, across at most 100 selected courses, so very large courses or course lists may be incomplete. No search text or answers are stored.

• Canvas's document viewer — PDFs and files in Canvas's viewer wear your palette (background, toolbar, thumbnails) with the pages left readable, or dimmed or inverted in a dark palette. Pen, highlighter and eraser (off by default): any color and size, undo and redo, clear page, export and import as a file, a page saved as a picture; kept on your device per site, account and file, never sent anywhere, and beside Canvas's own annotations, never over them.

• Syllabus import (Canvas and Blackboard, off by default) — read a course's syllabus on your device: Canvas's own Syllabus page, a PDF, a photo or screenshot, a Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx), web page or text file, or pasted text, in English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch or Portuguese. Glaze finds the professor (name, e-mail, office, office hours), class times, exam and due dates (in the course's term year), the grading scale and the weights, then shows every field for you to correct, each with the line it came from and "Check this" on a guess. Nothing is kept until you save. Then the professor, class times and coming dates show on the course home; the scale can become the course's in your GPA, the dates your own Better To Do tasks, and the weights show beside the what-if calculator (Canvas's own weights still count). Edit or delete it from the course home; Ctrl+K has Import a syllabus on any course page.

• Gradescope in To Do (off by default) — your Gradescope assignments in Better To Do, on the course cards and in reminders, marked Gradescope with a link to each and their status (submitted, graded with the score, late, missing). On gradescope.com Glaze asks once which of your Canvas or Blackboard courses each Gradescope course belongs to (with a guess by course code), then reads your assignments whenever you visit, and optionally once a day from Canvas or Blackboard, signed in as you. Each Canvas or Blackboard account is asked once, with one quiet line where its Gradescope work would show (Better To Do, the course cards or the reminders hub), before any of it shows there. Read only, kept on your device.

• Dashboard notes and widgets (Canvas and Blackboard Ultra, off by default) — on Ultra, in Glaze's panel at the top of the Courses page's right column, above Ultra's To Do (it folds away). A notes box (small, medium or large; saved as you type, on your device, links clickable) and a grid of widgets under the Dashboard's heading: an agenda of any day (from your planner and Better To Do's plans, with previous and next day), a focus timer (work and break lengths, an optional chime, and it keeps running from page to page), a quote (original lines in every language, changing every few seconds or once a day, with pause), music (a Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music or YouTube Music link; nothing loads until you press Load player), a guided breathing exercise and a study buddy. Order, size and float them: a floating widget stays over every Canvas page, dragged or moved with the arrow keys, and snaps to the window's edges and the other floating widgets. On Blackboard Ultra the widgets float on the Courses page (starting where the panel was, at the top of its right column, which keeps room for them so Ultra's To Do is never under one) and on Glaze's Dashboard: the Institution page gets two tabs in its header, Dashboard (the default, with a layout of its own and Canvas's default widgets) and Institution page (Ultra's own), and the last one you chose is kept. Edit layout moves them anywhere, dragged by their heading or with the arrow keys on their handle (Shift: further; each move is announced), snapping to a grid, the edges, each other and Ultra's column, with a guide while you drag; Alt places freely. Fold any widget to its heading; on a window too narrow for the layout they stack, and the layout is kept for a wider one. Any widget can also float over every Blackboard page (⇱ in Edit layout, ⇲ to put it back), clear of the nav and a course's top bar, and only once. The Dashboard is on by default (Glaze Dashboard, its own switch; Better To Do is one of its widgets). Open Blackboard on the dashboard (off by default) goes on to the Dashboard once when Ultra opens on its start page right after you sign in. What Glaze can do (Ctrl+K, or the Dashboard) lists every Canvas extra with its switch, an optional tour and Report a problem, a GitHub issue with your Glaze version and browser filled in (GitHub receives that text when the page opens; nothing is posted until you submit it).

• Notes (Canvas and Blackboard Ultra, off by default) — one switch with the Dashboard notes (on Ultra: Course notes on a course outline, and links to a course's content items): a notes app over the page, folders for a course or for anything, rich text (headings, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, lists, checklists, quotes, code, links), pictures pasted or added and attachments, and links to a course's Canvas files, pages and module items picked from a list. Search titles and text, sort by last edited, created or title, filter by course or folder; rename and move notes, rename, reorder and delete folders (keeping their notes or trashing them too). A trash keeps deleted notes and folders 30 days. Export a note as Markdown or HTML, or everything as a zip of Markdown and pictures that imports back (a note already there is replaced only by a newer copy, so importing the same backup twice adds nothing). The same note changed in two tabs never loses text: the later save becomes a copy beside it. It opens and acts only on your own clicks and keys. Open it from Ctrl+K (Notes, New note, Course notes), the Dashboard notes, a course card's create menu, Course notes on a course's home, or a class reminder. Kept on your device in Glaze's own storage, which your school's pages can't read; the Dashboard notes stay as they are.

• Class schedule (Canvas and Blackboard) — import your timetable from an .ics calendar (a file, or a calendar link on your own Canvas or Blackboard site), a PDF, a photo or a screenshot (also pasted into the text box), a registrar's page saved as HTML, a Word file or text you paste (Banner, PeopleSoft and Workday copies, "MWF 9:00–9:50 AM", "TR 1:30-2:45pm", 24-hour times, and day names in all six languages). Glaze reads it on your device and shows every class it found for review before anything is kept: each one matched to your course by code or name (or kept as not one of your courses there), every field editable, guesses marked, holidays and breaks as days off. Your classes show in the agenda widget with the day's work, and optionally as class-start reminders. Ctrl+K, Class schedule, or the agenda's button.

• PDFs and photos, read on your device — the three imports above read a PDF's own text (tables kept as rows, two-column pages in order) and, for a scanned PDF, a photo or a screenshot (PNG, JPEG, WebP, and HEIC where your browser opens it), recognize the text with an OCR engine bundled in Glaze (Tesseract, with its English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese models). Nothing is uploaded and nothing is downloaded for it. A progress line says how far it has got, Stop reading or closing the dialog stops it, and when the text came from a picture the review says so and marks what the engine wasn't sure of. Limits: 50 MB and 100 pages per PDF (20 scanned pages), 30 MB and 60 megapixels per picture.

• Reminders and streak (Canvas and Blackboard, every part off by default) — due-date reminders at the lead times you pick (15 minutes to 2 days, several at once), exam reminders (quizzes and exam-like titles in all six languages), reminders for Better To Do's "do on" days and focus sessions, and class-start reminders from your class schedule (5 to 30 minutes before), each its own switch. They show only inside Canvas or Blackboard, as one small toast in the corner that never takes focus, never as a browser notification; what came due while Canvas was closed shows once, not as a pile. A hub from the To Do header's bell or Ctrl+K lists what's coming and lets you mute items. An optional streak counts the days in a row with nothing missed, with two free restores a month. Everything stays on your device.

• Pet habitat (off by default) — enable it under Study tools → Pet habitat in the editor or What Glaze can do, then open Pet habitat in Ctrl+K. Use Edit widgets → + Pet habitat on Canvas's Dashboard or Ultra's Courses panel. Your study buddy earns 20 XP for work handed in on time, 10 for late work, 15 when the submission timing is unknown, 8 for a kept “do on” plan, and 5 for each closed streak day already checked by W11 while Streak is on. The saved W11 start and calculation day (asOf), including free restores, are the only streak source. Stale records stop at their calculation day; legacy records wait for W11 to recalculate. Today and all-time best do not mint days. Switching Streak off freezes new streak XP without taking earned days away. Five levels unlock a mint bandana, a happy look, and books, a mushroom, a moon and stars to place in a small habitat. Rewards use only work, plans and streaks already stored on this device; the game never asks for assignments or runs a timer to track study. No focus-session XP, notifications, sad pets or missed-day penalties. Repeated reads do not add XP twice. Visible unticks (including synced planner ticks and manual done mode) and newer submission corrections remove work/plan credit. Clearing Insights or deleting finished task/plan history keeps settled XP. Historical hand-ins and kept plans can earn a first reward without a planner row. A missing synced row preserves settled work/plan credit; work credit can also update when a fresh saved source proves a hand-in newer than the saved provider hand-in timestamp. Each site's signed-in account has its own progress and decorations. A record has limits of 4,096 contributions, source versions, provider hand-in baselines and credited days; a full or damaged record is left untouched with an explanation, rather than reset. Moodle currently has no stored account-scoped completion source, so the game is absent there.

• On Moodle — the theme on Moodle's Boost theme (Moodle 5; 4.x where its markup is the same): Dashboard, My courses, course and activity pages, grades, calendar, messages and the login page. Your course total on each course card, from Moodle's grades overview (points, a percentage or a letter, as your Moodle shows it); what's due this week from your Timeline, in the popup and the Ctrl+K palette, which also lists Moodle's pages, your courses and the course's tabs. A course's own tint and Look on its course and activity pages and on its card, set from the course menu on the card or in the editor (the colour is the one Moodle gives the course), and the keyboard shortcuts (g then d, c, a, g, m, ?) on the Dashboard, My courses, calendar, grades, messages, and a course's sections and activities.

• Looks — ten ready-made combinations (Graveyard and Pumpkin Patch are for Halloween) of palette, fonts, shape and background, one click each in the popup or the editor, or one for a single course.

• Editor — every setting in one page with a live preview; the popup keeps the quick controls.

• Theme codes — share your palette, fonts, look and background as one line of text; a pasted code previews before it applies.

• Canvas sidebar — style Canvas's own navigation with a solid color, gradient or picture, filters and an overlay; choose text and icon colors, labels and size, hide the institution logo or collapse the rail. Every native link stays reachable. The editor warns about low contrast; local pictures share the course-card storage limits and stay on this device. Theme codes carry linked pictures only. Canvas only.

• Canvas course cards — each Dashboard card its own color, gradient or picture (a link, or a file kept on your computer) with filters, focus, zoom and overlay; bookmarks as icons on the card; card width, spacing, corners, picture height and a condensed layout; hover effects, particles and a cat or bunny on your first card; an optional create button. The card editor warns, with the measured ratio, when text on a card would be hard to read. Fonts can be searched.

• Looks gallery — free Looks shared openly at frostdev.io/glaze/looks. Use this Look in Glaze opens it in the editor's preview; save favorites, and go back with Previous Look from a history of the themes you wore. Both stay on your device.

• Stickers, pointers and Look rotation — put stickers from four packs, or your own pictures, on any course page (Ctrl+K: Place stickers on this page), then drag, resize, turn or remove them with the pointer or the keyboard; they never get in the way of a click and stay off quizzes you are taking. Three pointer sets (Aqua, Lilac, Pearl) or your own picture, with the usual text cursor kept in text fields. Look rotation wears the next of your chosen Looks and favorites every 6, 12 or 24 hours, weekly or daily at a set time. Free, unlimited, and kept on your device.

• Hide folders (Blackboard Ultra, on by default) — eye buttons hide folders and learning modules in a course outline on this device. Show hidden folders (N) restores them dimmed with a Hidden badge and an always-visible unhide eye; the pressed toggle becomes Hide them again (N). Hidden is included in the folder’s accessible name, with native naming restored when the marker goes away. A brief, polite status confirms saved changes; Undo restores the folder just hidden. Undo stays within the current account and course and ends on navigation or disabling. Keyboard hiding keeps focus on the outline controls. Nested folders keep their own hidden state. This changes only the outline display: search, Download all, progress and new-item counts still include hidden content. It makes no requests. Controls appear only once another existing Glaze feature has identified the signed-in account; course-list refresh (at most every ten minutes) and inline grade chips normally do this. If those readers have not run on a fresh page, controls stay absent. Visiting the profile/sign-out route revokes this feature’s identity until a new identity read or reload. Turning the switch or Glaze off restores the native outline; saved choices remain. Export all includes these device records; importing ignores malformed folder records and preserves their existing choices.

• Course tabs (Blackboard Ultra, on by default) — each course you open gets a tab, above the course's top bar (or between its rows, or below it), on an item opened over the course or its full routed header, and above pages outside a course. A tab picked from the strip is a live Blackboard page of its own, kept running while hidden, like a browser tab: a retained live page keeps its native state while you switch. Up to four framed course pages stay live alongside the surrounding page. Edited pages stay until explicitly closed; if all four are edited, close one before opening another. A clean older page may reopen at its saved URL and scroll, losing other native state. Closing, reloading or turning tabs off can lose unsaved native work. While a tab's page first loads, a blurred picture of how it last looked covers it; pictures stay in memory only, never on disk. Glaze does not prefetch other courses; hidden native pages can continue their own requests. Close, pin and reorder with the mouse or the keyboard; past the cap the least recently used unpinned tab closes, with a word. Shape, size, width, name or code, a colour dot or icon, and each course's colour as a tint, with a live preview in the editor. The first-load picture captures visible pixels, including CDN styling and visible form values; it is blurred while loading. At the hard limit of 40 retained entries, close or unpin one before another course gets a tab.

• Languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil) and Dutch. On Blackboard, Glaze writes in the language Ultra is shown in; the editor and popup follow the browser. Adding one is a file in i18n/ (see lib/i18n.js); the five above are machine translations, and corrections are welcome as bug reports.

• Any host — matches https://*/ultra/*, so it works on your university's Blackboard without configuration. Canvas is matched on *.instructure.com, and recognized by its own stylesheet on a school's own domain. Moodle is recognized by the keywords line its core writes in every page's head, together with the page id and layout it puts on the page's body.

Blackboard Ultra's base navigation supports both its newer MUI drawer and legacy rail. In the editor, choose a Glaze, school or device-only custom logo, set precise rail/icon/label sizes and spacing, and add up to eight http/https links with built-in icons. Compact rows use ellipsis and full labels on hover/focus, with optional two-line word wrap or a bounded smaller font. Choose tile/pill/flat items, backgrounds, active indicators, logo size/alignment and footer visibility. Each editor section has its own reset; drag or arrow-key handles reorder items and widgets. The real nav preview follows the current Look, with expanded/collapsed/icons-only and light/dark views. Native items can be reordered or hidden and restored with Reset navigation; the Institution page entry reads Dashboard with its original destination while Glaze's Dashboard is enabled. Optional clock/date, next-due item, shared focus timer and pet-level widgets can be ordered at the top or bottom. Export all includes the navigation settings and links; local pictures remain on their device, and Look codes carry only the existing appearance fields. Next due shares the agenda/Better To Do planner and account/cache rules, refreshing only while enabled and visible, with a one-minute backoff after a failed read. The bundled logo, sizes and Dashboard naming apply on the initial path; custom local pixels use that logo until ready. Optional order/hiding, links and widgets settle after their on-demand module arrives. A collapsed rail expands over the page on hover (optional), keyboard focus or its touch control; leaving it or tapping outside closes that temporary overlay without changing the saved collapsed preference. The native fixed drawer keeps main content at the top, including with custom nav backgrounds; the expand control also centers in right-to-left layouts. Narrow modal drawers keep Ultra's native width.

Install

Chrome: install from the Chrome Web Store.

Load unpacked (development):

1. Clone or download this repository.
2. Open chrome://extensions.
3. Enable Developer mode (top right).
4. Click Load unpacked and select the repository folder.
5. Open your Blackboard Ultra, Canvas or Moodle site and click the Glaze icon.

Safari

Download the Mac app: signed and notarized, attached to each release on GitHub Releases. It runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 12 or newer. Glaze's styling needs Safari 17.2 or newer; the frosted-glass blur needs Safari 18.

1. Open the .dmg, open Glaze and click Install Glaze. It copies itself into Applications (your own ~/Applications if you aren't an administrator) and reopens from there. Dragging it into Applications works too. (A .zip of the same app is there too.)
2. Glaze opens Safari's Extensions settings and shows an illustrated guide: tick Glaze, then allow it on your Blackboard, Canvas or Moodle site. The guide ticks off the first step as soon as Safari turns Glaze on.

The downloaded Mac app checks https://frostdev.io/projects/glaze/appcast.xml about once a day while Glaze is in use and downloads updates from GitHub. Sparkle system profiling is disabled. Background checks stay silent and skip updates that need user interaction; opening Glaze yourself can show the standard updater interface. An installation previously prepared through that interface may still show its existing progress window when a background check finishes it. The Mac App Store and iPhone/iPad apps use App Store updates and include no Sparkle updater.

Safari loads Glaze from this Mac app. The Xcode project is in safari/; to build the app yourself you need Xcode and the public key from Mac update release setup:

sh scripts/build-safari.sh

That packages the extension, copies it into a temporary copy of the project, and builds a universal app in release/Glaze.app, signed with the configured Developer ID. Override SAFARI_SIGN_IDENTITY and SAFARI_TEAM_ID to use a different identity. Safari only installs apps from outside the App Store when they are notarized, so pass a saved notarytool Keychain profile:

NOTARY_PROFILE=your-profile sh scripts/build-safari.sh

or set ASC_KEY_PATH, ASC_KEY_ID and ASC_ISSUER_ID for an App Store Connect API key. The script then notarizes the app, staples the ticket, checks Gatekeeper, and writes release/glaze-<version>-safari-macos.zip and a notarized .dmg, each with its SHA-256 checksum. Without credentials the zip is marked unnotarized and is for development only.

For the Mac App Store, scripts/appstore-safari.sh archives the same project with App Store signing and uploads the build to App Store Connect. It needs an App Store Connect API key with the Admin role in ASC_KEY_PATH, ASC_KEY_ID and ASC_ISSUER_ID; Xcode creates the distribution certificate and profiles on first use. APPSTORE_EXPORT_ONLY=1 builds the signed package without uploading. Listing text, screenshots and review submission happen in App Store Connect.

The app bundles only the files the Xcode project lists for its two extension targets (Mac and iOS); a folder reference brings everything under it. Every build script copies the package into the project's Resources folder and then runs node scripts/safari-resources.js on it, which stops the build if the package has a file the project doesn't list. Add a new top-level file or folder to both extension targets in Xcode; test/safari-resources.test.js checks the project against everything the package ships.

scripts/package-safari.sh regenerates the Xcode project from scratch and replaces its native edits. Use it only when you mean to regenerate the project. It doesn't know about the iPhone and iPad targets below.

Mac update release setup

The Developer ID build stages Sparkle 2.10.0 in a temporary Mac project through scripts/stage-safari-dmg.py; the checked-in App Store project stays free of Sparkle. Glaze's signing key was made once with the Sparkle distribution's key generator (bin/generate_keys), which keeps the private key in the login Keychain (account ed25519) of the Mac that made it. Back it up with generate_keys -x <file> and keep that file somewhere safe: without it, no update can be signed for apps already installed. scripts/build-safari.sh passes the public key (0lbeC9MO1QDsjSGjs6iyxSBwXKMpEiKVoB+5wZwQEqY=, or SAFARI_UPDATE_PUBLIC_KEY if set) into SUPublicEDKey in the staged Mac app's Glaze/Info.plist. Staging on its own without a key leaves updates disabled; a release build rejects the REPLACE_WITH_SPARKLE_EDDSA_PUBLIC_KEY placeholder.

After building and notarizing a release, generate its signed update entry locally (replace <version> with the manifest version):

sh scripts/safari-appcast.sh "release/glaze-<version>-safari-macos.dmg" /path/to/Sparkle/bin

The helper verifies the notarized DMG and app, checks that the Keychain signing key matches the app's public key, and writes release/appcast.xml, preserving older entries. It does not publish anything. Upload the DMG to its GitHub release before publishing that feed at https://frostdev.io/projects/glaze/appcast.xml (the frostdev.io path is /projects/glaze/appcast.xml). Use the same Sparkle Keychain account for key generation and appcast signing; if you choose a custom account, set SAFARI_UPDATE_KEY_ACCOUNT to it when running the helper.

iPhone and iPad

Glaze for Safari on iPhone and iPad needs iOS or iPadOS 18 or newer. It comes from the same App Store listing as the Mac app; buying or installing on one platform covers the other.

1. Install Glaze and open it. It shows a two-step guide.
2. Turn Glaze on in Settings › Apps › Safari › Extensions › Glaze by switching on Allow Extension. On iOS 26.2 and newer, the guide's Open Settings button takes you to Safari's extension settings, and the guide ticks the step off as soon as Glaze is on.
3. Open your Blackboard Ultra, Canvas or Moodle site in Safari and tap the extensions button in the address bar (a puzzle piece; on iPhone it can be in the page menu at the left of the address). Tap Glaze, then Always Allow… and Always Allow on This Website, and reload the page.

The popup and the editor are under the same button. The editor also opens from Settings › Apps › Safari › Extensions › Glaze › Settings.

The iOS app is two more targets in the same Xcode project (Glaze iOS and Glaze iOS Extension), sharing the extension's resources and native handler with the Mac targets. scripts/appstore-ios.sh archives it with App Store signing into release/Glaze-iOS.xcarchive and release/glaze-<version>-ios.ipa. It uses the App Store profiles already on the Mac; set ASC_KEY_PATH, ASC_KEY_ID and ASC_ISSUER_ID to let Xcode create them. It never uploads unless APPSTORE_UPLOAD=1 is set. To try it in the Simulator, run the Glaze iOS scheme in Xcode.

How it works

The content script adds three stylesheets it owns (theme.css, motion.css, extras.css) at page start, so the popup can switch the theme on and off without a reload. theme.css remaps Blackboard's own --palette-* custom properties onto Glaze's --gz-* tokens and restyles Ultra's components. Every setting becomes either a --gz-* variable or a data-gz-* attribute on <html>, which the content script writes from your saved settings, so the CSS never needs JavaScript to decide anything. A small DOM sweep tags the long tail — hardcoded light backgrounds, dark text, viewport-fixed bars — with data-gz-* attributes the stylesheets then restyle.

Each LMS loads only what it needs at first paint: the shared content.js (with the small libraries it uses) plus that site's own part, content-ultra.js on Blackboard Ultra and content-canvas.js on Canvas. Moodle has no part; it is themed by content.js and moodle.css. Everything else, from the command palette to the grade calculators, loads on demand from features/ the first time a page needs it.

Building

./package.sh

Writes dist/glaze-v<version>.zip, ready for the Chrome Web Store. Requires node and zip.

node --test

Runs the tests for the colour, settings and page-text logic. No dependencies to install.

Publishing to the Chrome Web Store

sh scripts/publish-chrome.sh

Packages the extension, uploads it with the Chrome Web Store API, and submits it for review. Pass a zip path to upload a specific build; set CWS_NO_PUBLISH=1 to upload without submitting. It signs in as the cws-publisher service account through gcloud impersonation, so no key file is kept: your Google account needs the Service Account Token Creator role on it, and the service account must be added under Account in the Developer Dashboard. The listing text, screenshots and privacy answers aren't in the API; edit those in the dashboard. The publisher and item IDs default to Glaze's; override them with CWS_PUBLISHER_ID and CWS_EXTENSION_ID (the publisher ID is in the dashboard's address, after /devconsole/).

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Privacy

Glaze stores your settings in chrome.storage.sync, including the course nicknames, colours, looks and tint you set in a course's menu. These follow Chrome sync when it's on; Safari keeps them on this device only. It keeps the course names your LMS lists, which grades and course items you've seen and a backup of what you type in Blackboard's editors (until it's posted, 14 days at most) on your own device. On Canvas it also keeps course names, codes and colors, unread-grade counts, module-item ids and your place, with site and account identifiers for badge records, and the what-if scores and pretend assignments you enter per site, account and course. On Blackboard it keeps the what-if scores and pretend assignments you enter, past terms and a GPA goal, a syllabus you import and an Insights summary the same way, per site and account. Your GPA choices per course (credits, level, scale) sync with your settings. Supported new Inbox drafts keep the body, subject and destination identifiers locally for up to 14 days. Your Looks history (the last 20 themes) and favorites stay on your device too, as do your stickers, your own sticker and pointer pictures and Look rotation's list; the Looks gallery is a website you visit yourself, and Glaze sends it nothing. Canvas's own what-if scores and editor recovery remain with Canvas. Better To Do's own tasks and plans stay on your device too, with a two-minute copy of your Canvas planner items or Blackboard due items. A calendar file you export (.ics) is made on your device and saved by your browser; it holds your course and assignment names, and Glaze keeps no copy. With Google Calendar sync connected (Chrome, off until you connect), Glaze sends the same events to the Glaze calendar in your Google account and reads back changes to them there, directly between your browser and Google (www.googleapis.com, and oauth2.googleapis.com to revoke access on Disconnect); Chrome keeps the sign-in. Dashboard notes, the widgets' layout, the timer and the music link you type stay on your device. So do the notes app's notes, folders, pictures and attachments, in Glaze's own storage (not the school page's); its Canvas link picker reads your own Canvas site, and only a link and title are kept. A music widget contacts its player (Spotify, YouTube through youtube-nocookie.com, Apple Music) only after you press Load player. Your class schedule stays on your device: the file, page or text you import is read there and never uploaded, and a calendar link is read only when it is on your own Canvas or Blackboard site. Course tabs show an automatic short name by default, with common term/section wrappers removed and subject codes spaced. A nickname wins; full-name and code choices remain available, and the original name and code stay in the tooltip and accessible name. Tabs keep your list (each course's id and original name, where you were in it, pinned or not) on your device, per site and account; routed page and scroll changes are saved only after native content establishes the destination. The blurred JPEG pictures shown during first load can include any visible content on the Blackboard tab and stay in memory only (the page, and the browser's session storage in Glaze's background worker), are never written to disk, and are dropped when the browser closes, when you turn the tabs or Glaze off, or when another account signs in. Reminders, what you've snoozed or muted and your streak stay on your device as well, and so do your marks on documents; reminders show only inside Canvas and Blackboard pages, and Glaze has no notifications permission. With Gradescope in To Do on, Glaze reads your own Gradescope course pages (read-only, signed in as you) and keeps the assignments on your device; nothing from Gradescope goes anywhere else. It has no analytics. Glaze's writes anywhere are opt-in: with Better To Do's "Tick off in Canvas too" on, ticking an item marks it done or not done in your own Canvas planner, as Canvas's List View does, and with Google Calendar sync connected it writes to the one calendar it made in your Google account. The extension's other requests are read-only and go to your own Blackboard, Canvas or Moodle site (folder previews; a folder's files when you click Download all; your grades and submission status for due dates, new-grade badges, the calculator and your overall grade on course cards; on Canvas a course's assignment groups when you use its what-if calculator; on Blackboard each course's grading schemas for the GPA, a course's grade categories when its what-if needs their names, this term's gradebooks with your submission status for Insights, and a course's documents when you import a syllabus from one; your course list and a course's items for the command palette and new-content badges; on Canvas, what you type in the command palette, to search your courses' titles), to Google Fonts or jsDelivr for a web font you choose, and to a background image, course card picture or sidebar picture you choose. For Canvas Download all, the extension's background worker fetches signed file links from your school's file host without cookies. Links and file bytes stay in memory while Glaze makes the zip; they are not saved in extension storage. Blackboard's course content answers can include a course tool's launch credentials: Glaze asks for them to be left out and never keeps them. The downloaded Mac app also checks https://frostdev.io/projects/glaze/appcast.xml about once a day and downloads updates from GitHub, with system profiling disabled. These services receive ordinary network requests, including your IP address. See PRIVACY.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Bundled with it, each under its own license beside it: three.js (MIT, lib/three.LICENSE), pdf.js and its JBIG2 and JPEG 2000 decoders (Apache-2.0 and BSD, lib/pdfjs/), and the Tesseract OCR engine and its tessdata_fast models (Apache-2.0, lib/tesseract/), each rebuilt by its scripts/vendor-*.sh.

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Blackboard is a trademark of Anthology Inc. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthology Inc.

Course-tab switches keep the surrounding page’s address in the address bar and add no history entry. Browser Back/Forward follows the browser’s frame history; copy a link inside the course to share its address. Hidden native pages continue running their own requests; Glaze pauses their animated scenes.