AccelerIE8
I’ve been using IE8 Beta 2 for some time now. One of its features is something called accelerators. The concept is simple. In our everyday browsing experience, we find ourselves copy and pasting text from one site to another. Examples of this would be searching for a particular term you read while browsing a page. What I’d normally do is open up a new tab, copy and paste the term into the search toolbar or type www.live.com in the address bar and then paste the term into the search text box.
What an accelerator does is to cut out the copy+open tab+paste steps.
To learn more about it, I tried my hand in creating an accelerator and ended up with two. An accelerator is nothing more than an xml file. I used this developer’s guide to get started.
The code below is an accelerator for looking up stock quotes from MSN Moneycentral.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
<homepageUrl>http://moneycentral.msn.com</homepageUrl>
<display>
<name>Get Stock Quote on MSN</name>
<icon>http://moneycentral.msn.com/favicon.ico</icon>
</display>
<activity category="Quote">
<activityAction context="selection">
<execute method="get" action="http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote">
<parameter name="Symbol" value="{selection}" type="text" />
<parameter name="getquote" value="Get+Quote" type="text" />
</execute>
</activityAction>
</activity>
</openServiceDescription>
[Edit] -- I can't get my link to work for now. I've uploaded these to http://www.ieaddons.com and I'll just link to them once they are up.
If you are using IE8, install my Get Stock Quote accelerator and try it out on the following: MSFT ORCL GOOG ACN (Select one of the stock symbols, right-click and select the 'Get Stock Quote' accelerator)
Or you can try out my Acronym Finder accelerator and look up the following acronyms: BRB YAGNI WTF JAFO
My only gripe at this point is the way the accelerators are accessed. I'm thinking a keyboard shortcut or a favorites mode would be better than what is available now.