| Web Marker 0.4 beta |
[Aug. 10th, 2006|10:41 pm] |
Web Marker does not
have a great UI. It is rather in-efficient to select text and move the
mouse over to the toolbar to highlight the selection (the context menu
option was'nt very friendly either). Taking inspiration from word
processors and going a step further, Toufeeq and I have revamped the
Web Marker UI. Now Web Marker supports a mark mode (just like emacs and Vim). In this mode selected text is automatically marked at the end of the selection event. The
Mark Button toggles between the normal mode and the mark mode.
In the normal mode, hitting the mark button does either of the following
actions:
- Marks selected text, if any. Web Marker stays in
normal mode.
- If there is no selected text, Web Marker switches
to Mark mode. From here on text selections are automatically
highlighted.
Toufeeq brilliantly came up with the above UI behaviour. It is
interesting to compare this with the feature available in current word
processor like applications. The formatting buttons such as highlight,
bold, italics etc. have to enabled every time a text selection is to be
formatted. Rather in-efficient, isn't it? Try out the 0.4b version of
Web Marker to see how it makes marking web pages a breeze.
Another small thing that made into this version of Web Marker - all buttons
of the toolbar are available as floating buttons i.e. they can be
attached to any of the existing Firefox toolbars. This lets you save on
screen estate. Having a toolbar occupy that much of space was'nt the
greatest piece of UI.
Please try it out and let us know. We are hearing.
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| Google video, link within videos |
[Jul. 25th, 2006|10:24 pm] |
Sridhar (nearfar)
pointed this to me. Ala Web-Marker, Google
has added a very
nice feature to Google videos, which lets you link from any point of
a Google video clip. That is, you can specify the starting point of the
video in terms of hours/minutes/seconds. It uses the fragment
identifier to specify this offset.
Annodex is a project which aims
to standardize fragment identifiers and annotation for audio and video
content.
Fragment identifiers are finally being used in a manner that
justifies their naming so.
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| Flickr ego tip |
[Jul. 13th, 2006|11:10 pm] |
You could tag your photos in Flickr,
(or in your favourite Web 2.0 photo app that supports tagging) in which
you are in present, with a tag like me or
I. This makes it easy to locate photos in which you
are present.
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| Emacs with Vim |
[Jul. 3rd, 2006|10:20 pm] |
I did this today
[ ~ ] $ vim ~/.emacs
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| TestGen4Web - Firefox record and play back |
[Jul. 1st, 2006|11:42 pm] |
TestGen4WebTestGen4Web is tool to record/replay user actions in Firefox. It includes a recorder and a translator. The recorder lets you record and replay Firefox events from within Firefox. The steps/actions/events performed on the HTML page (not on the Firefox XUL elements) are saved in a XML formatted file which can edited, reloaded and replayed. Though events on only the current tab can currently be recorded, I think the developers should soon be extending it to work across tabs/windows. The translator converts the recording into scripts which can be used from the command line to test websites in an automated fashion. This is nice stuff from Spikesource. ( ★★★★☆) Review by Natarajan Kannan, July 2006 I made this post in a hreview format. We need better user interfaces to write microformatted documents. |
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| GMail: filter and action |
[Jun. 30th, 2006|01:55 pm] |
GMail should have a filter - action feature i.e. I should be able to filter messages based on a criteria and apply actions (delete, archive, label etc.) to all of them one go. Just like mutt's operate on tagged messages. It would be one mighty useful feature. The current interface of 50 messages per page is sometimes very limiting. |
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| Emacs beginner HOWTO acknowledges the truth |
[Jun. 30th, 2006|09:32 am] |
Just as I started another attempt to scale the Emacs learning curve, the Emacs Beginner HOWTO acknowledged [1] what Emacs fans refuse to accept.
[1] This is a web-marker link. Install Web-Marker for Firefox to see what I want to point out exactly.
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| Web-Marker - Mark web pages and tell the world about it |
[Jun. 11th, 2006|10:32 pm] |
Thanks to all who responded to my LiveURLs love post. We've decided not to worry about the name of the URLs. They will remain LiveURLs. We are coming out with the first application based on LiveURLs. It is called Web-Marker, your marker pen for the web. Thanks a ton ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mewpsych for the name. We owe you a treat. Toufeeq has a post on it here.
So what does Web-Marker let you do?
- You can mark portions of a document (when you mark, you get to see the markings)
- Multiple non-contiguous marks are supported. This was the first feature that everyone requested when we released LiveURLs. More markings mean longer LiveURLs (we are working to shorten it :))
- You can bookmark the marked document or copy the link to the marked document to the clipboard.
- You can navigate between marks on a page.
- You can clear all/individual marks from a document.
Web-Marker was first demo-ed at the www2006. It was received very well and we got some really good suggestions and use cases. More on that in another post.
Web-Marker was approved by Firefox addons today and is available here. Play around with it and leave your suggestions as comments at Web-Marker's homepage. You could also leave your rating of the extension at the site. It helps in evaluating the extension and is a good source of feedback for us. Also report any bugs you find at the mozdev bugs page.
Few caveats
- It does not support URLs generated with the LiveURLs extension.
- You would have to uninstall the LiveURLs extension for Web-Marker to work.
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| www2006 - Overall |
[Jun. 1st, 2006|09:30 am] |
www2006 was special in many ways.
- Met a lot of interesting and brilliant people
- Learnt a lot of new things
- Figured out what I should be doing for sometime to come
- Took a snap with the inventor of the World Wide Web
There was a lot of focus on Semantic Web and search related research.
Workshops/tutorials I attended
Brian and Ryan showed some really cool microformat applications. A demo is proof enough for one to understand how powerful semantic web documents, that can be processed by computer applications, are. For starters, try this for a demo:
XForms by Steve Pemberton was eye opening. Truly class stuff. I did not know about XForms before. Though it might take longer to get accepted and deployed, it is certainly the future of forms on the web.
Papers I attended
Being blissfully unaware of search engine technologies, I did not have a great time following the paper presentations. But most of them had interesting observations that anyone following stuff on the net could relate to.
For me "the person" of the conference was Bebo White. He was the most lovable person. The child-like enthusiasm he showed when he saw our poster was infectious. |
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| GMail auto-detecting events |
[May. 31st, 2006|06:15 pm] |
GMail seems to infer lot of semantic information from mails. See this image for a suggestion.
The mail talks about a dinner event on a particular day and time. See the recommendation at the right to add it to your Google calendar. Pretty awesome to do it from plain text info. I was blown away when I saw demos doing similar stuff the microformats way. This is far harder to do and so is more cool. Yay! to GMail and Google again. |
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| WWW2006 |
[May. 20th, 2006|02:05 pm] |
I will be off to Edinburgh, Scotland for a week to take part in The 15th International World Wide Web conference. toufeeq and I would be presenting our poster on LiveURLs. We have got some interesting applications of LiveURLs to be demo'ed there. More on them in later posts.
Any suggestions on places to visit around Edinburgh? Roselyn Chapel, where the Da Vinci code trail ends is on our list of to visit places. |
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| Love for LiveURLs |
[Apr. 24th, 2006|09:50 pm] |
LiveURLs opened to a very, very lukewarm response last week. We got a lot of good feedback. toufeeq has summarized the feedback. As he mentions, the biggest lesson we learnt from the release was that, a product is as effective as its marketing. But first things first, we need a name for the project to strike a chord with the users. LiveURLs just does not make the cut. People do not have the time to read the project description to find out what the extension does.
The only requirement is that the name should convey what the extension lets the user do i.e. generate links to user selected portions of webpages. Listed below are a few suggestions (in no particular order) that we have received over the weekend:
- web-marker (mewpsych - this one is a very very apt suggestion. Thanks a ton :))
- zillaurls
- snippet
- snip'it (surprisingly mahendra and mewpsych suggested the same name)
- fraglet
- frag-meant - (the fragment that I meant!!!! Rajesh Balakrishnan's (RB) play with words rocks)
- frag-mark - It also has the in-built "Agmark" stamp of approval ;-) Another gem from RB.
- pagelet
- snipurl
- selection-url (via Nitin. Thanks buddy. Nice straight-forward one)
- fragment-links
- snippet-links
- urlhere (by nearfar)
- linkhere (based on nearfar's suggestion :))
- linkit
- linkthis
- herelinks (again based on nearfar's 'here' suggestion :))
- By bhuvanbk
- By rfc9000
- By anonymous
- By thanix
- By Shanmugavel Mani
- URL it!
- CustomURL
- CustomizedURL
- MyURL
- Make[My|Ur]URL
- Define[Your|My]URL
- RenderURL
- GenerateURL
The above list will be updated with suggestions in the comments. Preference would be given to names which try to capture both the fragment and link semantics. We owe the best name a treat. |
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| LiveURLs - my best hack till date |
[Apr. 19th, 2006|05:40 pm] |
Have you ever wanted to share a portion of a web page with others? We've made it easier for you. Toufeeq and I have been working on this Firefox extension project for sometime and now it is out for everyone to try and put to use.
The extension page at Firefox addons
The extension page at Mozdev
Screenshots
( LiveURLs - Behind the scenes )
The impatient ones please
- Install the Firefox extension from here.
- Select a portion of a web page and invoke the context menu (i.e. right click menu)
- Select either "Copy link to selected content" or "Copy position of selected content". This action copies the selected content as a URL to the clipboard.
- Open the LiveURL in a different tab/window of Firefox which has the same version of the LiveURLs extension installed.
- The browser should show the previously selected content highlighted. (If it does not work, report the bug with the LiveURL that did not work)
Note:
The sender and receiver of the LiveURL should have the same version of the LiveURL extension installed. Though fully functional, this is in its early stage of development. So backward compatibility of LiveURLs might not be supported i.e. there is no guarantee that LiveURLs generated with one version of the extension will work with another version.
This is one hack that I will be proud of, all my life. I hope you find it useful. |
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| Screenshots in Linux |
[Apr. 5th, 2006|10:30 pm] |
If you ever needed to take a screenshot on Linux, which needs to be captured like an auto-timed photo, use GIMP's timed screenshot feature. Here it is File -> Acquire -> Screen shot. So just click and wait for the "flash". |
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| Mark Shuttleworth visiting Bangalore |
[Jan. 17th, 2006|03:37 pm] |
Mark Shuttleworth is visiting Bangalore, and will be meeting with the BLUG on Thursday the 19th Jan. More details here.
Wikipedia has the following links about him |
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| Livejournal Friends OPML feed list |
[Dec. 7th, 2005|02:14 pm] |
Re-used teemus's friendsCollage "extensively" to get something I wanted. The friends page is one of LJ's killer features. But if you have too many friends to track, an OPML feed folder of all your friends is useful. Most RSS aggregators (GNOME's liferea, KDE's akregator, Yahoo's konfabulator, Google's Reader etc.), have the capability of organizing feeds under a folder. This form gives you an OPML feed list of all your Livejournal friends organized under a folder.
This is how you can use it. - Generate a feed using this form for a LJ user-id
- Save the OPML output to a file
- Import the file to your favourite RSS aggregator
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| My first greasemonkey script |
[Nov. 7th, 2005|11:12 pm] |
Started fiddling around with greasemonkey for the first time yesterday. It is just "Uber Cool" stuff. Decided to write a simple script to add some functionality that I some times desparately needed on LJ.
Editing a post (using the browser) as you read through it, is not straight forward (atleast as far as I know :). I needed a reason for this script to exist). You need to go through the manage interface and a couple of more form submissions to get to the edit page of your entry. Assuming you have Greasemonkey installed, head to this script. The script has installation instructions. After installing the script, open your LJ home page. If you are logged in, you should see a tiny Edit Post link to the right of the Leave Comments link or to the right of the Post Comment link on the permalink page.
This might prove useful to people who re-visit their pages once in a while, to spot an error or two and correct them. It might not prove useful to many too, but who cares. Greasemonkey is awesome and Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into GreaseMonkey" is just the kind of manual you need to start off. Another interesting, more snazzy and useful LJ user script is instant comment.
Update
It turns out that some LJ themes have the edit post link as part of the post. Also all permalink pages have a edit post link on top. My script has turned a damp squib. Helps only if you use a minimal LJ theme which has no edit post link. |
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| Why I like FOSS |
[Oct. 7th, 2005|09:41 am] |
appaji had recently posted about why he liked Free Software. Though my experience is not half as informative or technical as appaji's was, it certainly does explain why I like Free Software.
I recently switched to mutt for email at office and was really happy with it. Mutt with header_cache enabled makes browsing IMAP folders a breeze. I had added two public folders of Microsoft Exchange to my list of mailboxes. (Public folders are mail folders that kind of give the functionality of mailing lists, but suck totally). Things were pretty fine until last week, when mutt started taking a long time to switch between mailboxes. It would fetch headers and hang at sorting the mailbox. I gave up and switched to Thunderbird.
But, I just could not give up on mutt. I wanted my nifty mutt back again. I guessed that the problem was because of IMAP idiosyncrasies between the the M$ server and mutt. Maybe the latest sources would work. So I downloaded the latest source from the site and built mutt. Still the problem persisted. Managed to spend a few more days with Thunderbird, intermittently trying out mutt to see if the problem resolved itself :-)
Then I remembered appaji's post. And this is what I did.
- Compiled mutt with debugging info enabled
- Killed mutt when it hung with SIGSEGV to get a core
- Located the function where mutt was spending time hanging out
- Ran mutt from gdb with breakpoint at the culprit function
- Few more steps through the code and viola!!! mutt was trying to sync up with the humongously big Public folder mailboxes when I switched between mailboxes
- Removed the public folders from my mailboxes variable in .muttrc and mutt is sprightly as ever.
Firstly FOSS gave me a wonderful e-mail client in mutt. It also gave me ability to see why my software did not perform as I wanted it to. It finally gave me the ability to fix it myself. |
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| Send mail as ... |
[Oct. 4th, 2005|08:15 am] |
GMail has come up with a stunner of a feature. Impressed me a mighty lot. You can send mails with a different From: header. And if you can forward that address to your GMail account, nothing like it. Once GMail interface - multiple accounts. Waiting for the day when GMail will become mutt :-) |
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| Bangalore Debian Developer Conference |
[Aug. 20th, 2005|10:42 pm] |
Today I attended the First Annual Bangalore Debian Conference. I am not sure if lot of people knew about it. I got to know about it from the Bangalore Linux Users Group mailing list. This post is an attempt to capture what happened as part of it. The meet did bring in some memories of the only ILUGC meet I ever attended. sunson used to take the meeting minutes and the fame of his minutes are part of ILUGC folklore now. A whole of lot of things were going through my mind while the meet was on. As a result, I might have missed out on details.
( Read more... )
Update:
Ramki's entry is here
Ganesan's entry is here |
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lazy
calm