Marc Abramowitz » My projects

Yahoo Search Sidebar 1.2

Marc — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:41:21 +0000

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.

Yahoo! Briefcase Widget

Marc — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 20:37:41 +0000

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

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

Marc — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:18:04 +0000

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

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

Screenshots

What is it?

This Yahoo! Music Engine DLL plugin installs a new item in the service drawer called
“Jabber Control”.

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

Jabber is an open-source instant messaging standard that uses a streamed XML protocol (over TCP) for communications. While Jabber was originally conceived for instant messaging, it is not uncommon to use the communication protocol for other purposes, such as receiving news headlines and simple system administration. The benefit of using Jabber is that it enables communication between arbitrary points on the Internet, even in situations where one or both servers are behind a firewall which blocks incoming traffic. Jabber can do this because clients make outbound connections to an intermediate server, which serves as an intermediary for the two clients – thus neither client needs to accept a connection.

I chose Jabber for this project, because I wanted to be able to control the Yahoo! Music Engine from a device which does not live on the user’s home network. My main goal was to be able to use my Treo 650 as a remote control for the Music Engine. The Treo has wireless internet capabilities but does not live on my home network – therefore, it needs to connect to my home network from the outside, traversing my firewall. I didn’t want to open ports on my firewall for this and I didn’t want to require users of my plugin to have to mess with their firewall configuration either.

Requirements

.NET 2.0 Runtime

Download

Download

Clients

You may control the YME from any Jabber-enabled client, such as:

Jabber desktop software, such as Exodus or Gush
Jabber wireless web-enabled chat software, such as Chatopus for the Treo 650, imov for PocketPC, IM+ for Blackberry, etc.
Future custom-developed applications for one or more wireless devices. These applications would be designed to function primarily as Music Engine remote controllers instead of chat programs. Thus, they would offer a more convenient user interface that takes advantage of all the features of the device. I would suggest writing such an app as a J2ME (Java) MIDlet – this would allow the application to run on a number of devices.

Command list

<<	previous track
p	previous track
>>	next track
n	next track
>	play/pause
V	volume up
v	volume down
?	help
h	help

Development notes

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

Jabber functionality is provided by Jabber-Net, which is a nice Jabber library for .NET.

Yahoo Music Engine plugin: Export2Excel

Marc — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:34:05 +0000

Screenshots

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

Microsoft Excel (I tested with Excel 2003)
.NET 2.0 Runtime

Download

Download

Development notes

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

My Atari stuff

Marc — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 08:21:59 +0000

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 . . . → Read More: My Atari stuff

Yahoo! Search Sidebar for Firefox

Marc — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 08:04:29 +0000

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.

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"