Rocking the blogosphere

Archive for the 'My projects' Category

Yahoo Search Sidebar 1.2

I updated my Yahoo Search Sidebar Firefox extension to version 1.2. The only changes are that it works with Firefox 2.0 and I eliminated a bunch of global JavaScript symbols, which is a good Firefox extension development practice for preventing extension conflicts.

This Firefox extension adds a "Yahoo! Search" item in Firefox's View | Sidebar
menu (Alt+Y is the shortcut key) that opens a sidebar tailored for Web searching with Yahoo! Search.

More info at the Yahoo Search Sidebar page

Yahoo! Briefcase Widget

I finally posted my Yahoo! Briefcase Widget, which I did with my colleague, Tony Wong, for a Hack Day like thing some time ago.


Yahoo! Briefcase Widget icon  
Yahoo! Briefcase Widget WinXP Explorer style view

This Yahoo! Widget Engine widget allows convenient viewing of the contents of your Yahoo! Briefcase with a Windows Explorer/OS X Finder like interface as well as upload and download capabilities.

YME Jabber Control

I’ve made my Jabber Control plugin for the Yahoo! Music Engine available for download.

YMEJabberPlugin screenshot  

This plugin allows the Yahoo! Music Engine to connect via Jabber (XMPP) protocol and listen for remote control events.

More info here


Yahoo! Music

Yahoo Music Engine plugin: Export2Excel

Screenshots

YMEExcelPlugin screenshot  

YMEExcelPlugin screenshot

What is it?

This Yahoo! Music Engine DLL plugin installs a new item in the service drawer called
“Export to Excel”. This new page has a button, which if clicked will
dump the contents of your media database to an Excel worksheet and then
autoformat it.

It may take a couple of minutes for Excel to import all of the data,
depending on how many items you have in your media database. During the
import, the A2 cell will display a “please wait…” message and when the
import is done, the message will change to say “DONE”.

Use cases

The main use for this is so that you can print out your list of songs
and share it with friends to see what you have in common. Folks who are
comfortable with VBScript could also use that to perform tasks on their
data (e.g.: do stats, graphing, etc.), which may be a win for people who
are skilled with VBScript and don’t want to learn to program the YME API.

Requirements

Download

Development notes

This plugin was created with Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Beta and the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS).

Want more plugins?

Check out http://plugins.yme.music.yahoo.com/

Want to write your own plugin?

Check out http://plugins.yme.music.yahoo.com/plugins/docs/

Donate

If you like this plugin and want to see more like it in the future (suggestions?), I invite you to donate whatever you think it’s worth to you.


Ian linked to me on the YME plugins site.


Yahoo! Music

My Atari stuff

I created a new “Atari stuff” page with the two Atari computer programs (written in BASIC) and accompanying articles that I wrote for Antic Magazine when I was a teenager.

Yahoo! Search Sidebar for Firefox

This Firefox extension adds a “*Yahoo! Search*” item in Firefox’s View | Sidebar
menu (Alt+Y is the shortcut key) that opens a sidebar tailored for Web searching with Yahoo! Search. It’s using JavaScript to access Yahoo’s Web Services API.

Yahoo! Search Sidebar screenshot

Check out my Yahoo! Search Sidebar for Firefox.

Direct download link on my sourceforge site

I’m working on getting this added to Mozilla Update. Here’s the "bug report"

Working on a Firefox sidebar

I’ve been messing around a bit in my spare time with an extension that adds a new sidebar to [Firefox][]. It’s not ready for public consumption yet and I can’t give too many details at this time, but hopefully I will be able to release it in the next few months.

Developing in Firefox has been a mixed experience. [XUL][] is pretty interesting and even [JavaScript is not as bad as I once thought it was][]. However, there are some annoying things. Like the fact that I tried to [hack my installed-chrome.txt][] and [disable XUL caching][] but it doesn’t seem to work and so after I make a change I have to restart Firefox. Ugh. This really slows me down and prevents me from getting in a proper groove.

[Firefox]: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
[XUL]: http://www.xulplanet.com
[disable XUL caching]: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Dev_:_Tips_:_Disable_XUL_cache
[JavaScript is not as bad as I once thought it was]: http://www.crockford.com/javascript/javascript.html
[hack my installed-chrome.txt]: http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/notes/quicksetup.php