talk page 5 - Dave's Blog

Gmail integration with Internet Explorer 8

2008 Apr 3, 9:00

With the new features of IE8 there's several easy ways to integrate Gmail, Google's web mail service, for mail composition, searching, and monitoring that I enjoy using.

Composition

I made a Send via Gmail activity that allows you to select some text, a document, or link and via the activity menu open a new tab to compose a new message with the selection. Go to my activity page and click "Send via Gmail" (source) to install it. I found info on the gmail composition URL in the comments of this gmail howto article and used that in the activity. I talked about activities previously.

Search

I've made a search provider that searches your gmail account. See my search provider page and select 'Gmail' (source) to install the Gmail search provider. Search providers aren't new to IE8 but this fits in with Gmail integration in IE. Again in the comments of another howto I found information on a Gmail search URL.

Monitor

New to IE8 is authenticated feed support and favorites bar monitoring which combined with the Gmail inbox feed means you can see when you get new mail in your favorites bar in IE. To do this, navigate to the feed https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom, click 'Subscribe to this feed', then click on the Add button in the upper left (the star with plus icon) and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar' to add this as a monitored item in the favorites bar. Next, right click on the new item in your favorites bar, open the properties dialog, and enter your Gmail username and password into the new username and password fields. Now when you get new mail the Gmail feed item will shine and bold and you'll be able to get to new messages in the dropdown. I described monitored feed items previously.

activity gmail search howto google ie feed rss opensearch

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Released with Activities

2008 Mar 5, 11:36

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available now. I can finally talk about some of the stuff I've been working on for the past year or so: activities. Activities let you select a document, some text on a document, or a link to a document and run that selection through a web service. For example, you could select a word on a webpage and look it up in Wikipedia, select an address and map it on Yahoo Maps, select a webpage and translate it into English with Windows Live Translator, or select a link and add it to Digg.

IE8 comes installed with some activities based on Microsoft web services but there's a page you can go to to install other activities. However, that page is missing some of my favorites that I use all the time, like del.icio.us. Accordingly, I've put together a page of the activities I use. MSDN has all the info on creating Activities.

Activities are very similar to other existing features in other browsers including the ability to add context menu items to IE. There's two important differences which make activities better. Activities have a preview window that pops out when you hover over an activity, which is useful to get in place information easily provided by developers. The other is that the interface is explicit and takes after HTML FORMs and OpenSearch descriptions. Because the interface is explicitly described in XML (unlike the context menu additions described above which run arbitrary script) we have the ability to use activities in places other than on a webpage in the future. And because activity definitions are similar to HTML FORMs, if your webservice has an HTML FORM describing it you can easily create an activity.

microsoft technical activity openservice ie8 ie activities msdn

LibraryThing Developers are Responsive

2008 Jan 31, 10:47

I use my recently added books feed from LibraryThing, a site I've mentioned before where you track, review, recommend, and share your books, and I put the recently added books on my page. I thought it might be nice to include the book covers so I suggested adding book covers to RSS feeds in LibraryThings 'Recommend Site Improvements' group. The next day I had a response from the founder and lead developer Tim Spalding who had started implementing the feature. I noticed a few bugs, reported them on the same thread, and he fixed them soon after. Fantastic! It makes me want to upgrade to a paying account.

Incidentally, if you notice the Ghost in the Shell book appear multiple times in my RSS feed its due to the previously mentioned iterative bug fixes. The same item appeared multiple times slightly differently with each bug fix and your RSS aggregator may have picked them up as distinct items.

tim-spalding librarything rss homepage

California Trip

2007 Dec 23, 11:18Sarah and I went down to California at the end of last month for a Thanksgiving visit with my parents. We visited the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium (fun fact: the aquarium scenes in Star Trek IV were filmed here) and saw many jelly fish. We wandered around Capitola where we visited many local shops and ate on the wharf. We shopped in Carmel and ate at the Forge in the Forest (fun fact: Clint Eastwood was the mayor of this city in the late 80s). We visited the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk which was very cold and closed.
My parents took us out to dinner on the first night and the rest of the nights we ate dinner at their house. They had the Shelton's over and I got to see Chris and Alison. It was fun to talk with them and catch up since its been quite a while since I'd seen them.
We stayed in the lovely beach house of our family friend's the Goodwins. My parents have been helping them fix it up and decorate it and it looks great. It was quite a treat staying in a house right on the ocean. Also of note, this was the first trip on which I was old enough to rent the car and accordingly I did all of the driving. This trip was very fun and relaxing.aquarium friends parents personal beach california vacation