Google Calendar ‘Quick Add’ smart keyword bookmark

Google Calendar has a nifty feature, “Quick Add”, where you can enter a natural-language string like “lunch with Justin, 1pm 20/4/08″, it parses it, and adds an appointment to your calendar. However, the link in the Calendar UI can’t be bookmarked; you have to go to the Calendar page, wait for it to sloooowly load all its AJAX bits, hit the link, and only then type the appointment details, by which time I’ve forgotten it anyway ADD-style. ;)

Elias Torrez came up with a Firefox extension to use the Quick Add feature in one keypress, but in my opinion that’s overkill — I don’t want the overhead of another extension, the upgrade worries, and I don’t want it using up a keyboard shortcut either. I’d prefer to just have this as a Firefox Smart Keyword – and thankfully the trick is in the comments for his blog post, from someone called Bjorn. So here’s the deal:

Name: Google Calendar Quick Add

Location: http://www.google.com/calendar/event?ctext=+%s+&action=TEMPLATE&pprop=HowCreated%3AQUICKADD

Keyword: newcal

Description: add a new event in Google Calendar

enjoy!

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Stretch-to-fit Textareas - Now A Firefox Extension

Since it’s been turning out to be really quite useful, here’s a Firefox extension version of the Stretch-to-fit Textareas Greasemonkey user-script I wrote a few weeks back. In other words, Greasemonkey not required!

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Searching GMail with a Firefox Smart Keyword

Here’s a Firefox Smart Keyword to search your GMail:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?search=query&view=tl&q=%s

Usage example, assuming you use ‘mail’ as the keyword: (CTRL-L) mail whatever

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‘Bugzilla See Earlier Comments’ User Script

Here’s a new Greasemonkey user script which fixes a minor annoyance in the Bugzilla user interface. When viewing the ‘Create a New Attachment’ page, this will transclude the previous comments onto the bottom of that page, for reference while editing: bz_see_earlier_comments.user.js

Thanks to Jesse Ruderman for the nifty AJAXish iframe-transclusion trick it uses.

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Greasemonkey: transcoding extension for Firefox

Web: Now this is very cool stuff: ‘Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any webpage to change it’s behavior.’

In other words, you can rewrite any page viewed in Firefox, as it transits between the server and your client’s display; a form of transcoding.

Traditionally, transcoding is performed using a HTTP proxy which applies the transformation, or a specialised HTTP user agent which transcodes and outputs a whole new set of documents with the results.

That was all a little hacky for full-scale integration into your web browser, though, so Greasemonkey is a big improvement for that use-case.

Some good links:

And some demos:

Remember, these are single, sub-100-line JS scripts, running entirely locally in the user’s web browser. The last one gives you an idea of what coolness is possible…

My contribution: an ad-removal script for Metafilter. It took some 30 seconds of hacking to produce this — soooo easy. It’s a whole new world of site customisation and hackable filtering. You thought AdBlock was good, this is ever niftier ;)

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A Firefox Extension plug

Web: Urgh, I still have this damn cold I picked up in Ireland… sniffle cough etc. More vitamin C needed!

Anyway, just a quick plug for a very deserving Firefox extension, one I haven’t seen mentioned widely. It’s pretty common, when you wish to print out a web page, that you wish you could get rid of the obnoxious extra-wide sidebar tables, gigantic ads, or other extraneous parts of the page. Well, now you can:

Nuke Anything is a Mozilla/Firefox extension which offers two great features in the right-click context menu:

  • Remove this object: this will remove the object you’ve right-clicked on — a table TD, paragraphs, images, IFRAMEs, etc.
  • Remove selection: more usefully, this allows you to select exactly what you want to remove with a left-button drag, then right-click to remove it.

It’s really useful. I almost never print anything out these days without scrubbing off a few unwanted sidebars ;)

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New Scientist’s psychic website

Web: The lovely C sent me a link of note — it’s the eglu, ‘the world’s most stylish and innovative chicken house and is the perfect way to keep chickens as pets’. (She has a thing about keeping chickens.)

So I was all set to link to that on NoMoreSocks.newscientist.com, New Scientist’s nifty new xmas-pressies site; but — get this: it will not load in Firefox 1.0PR, 1.0, or Konqueror at all — in fact, using telnet, the site doesn’t actually respond to requests on port 80 from my linux desktop.

The only browser it seems to work with is MS Internet Explorer in VMWare, presumably using MSIE’s psychic powers to contact it without going through TCP/IP.

Mysteriously, it can be lynxed from my server in Ireland, but similarly doesn’t work for C’s Firefox installation on her desktop. How wierd!

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Firefox 1.0PR’s software installation UI

Security: Given the current prevalence of phishing attacks and spyware infestations, designing a good user interface that protects naive users against malware is now more urgent than ever.

Firefox is, of course, widely touted as more secure than MSIE. This is by and large true, due partly to MS’ emphasis in their UIs on one-step ‘easy’ installation and confirmation-dialog reduction (in my opinion) — but also due to the fact that spyware companies don’t yet see Firefox as a target to the same extent.

This changed recently — spyware ‘toolbars’ started to appear for Firefox as well. It was quite a surprise to see a dialog pop up when accessing an otherwise normal-looking (though advertising-heavy) page, using my Linux desktop, prompting me to install some ‘toolbar’ .xpi file!

Firefox 1.0PR now includes code to deal with this. Here’s how it works.

If a site I’m viewing attempts to install an XPI file, I get this prompt:

Note that it’s NOT a dialog. This is pretty handy, because it means that I won’t get annoying dialogs all the time if I do accidentally go to a unscrupulous site; it just appears like the part of the page. In the clueless user case, they may not even notice that they’ve been protected, which reduces the risk that they’ll install the extension anyway.

(However, I would have extended it by using an icon or look-and-feel that indicated that this was a ‘trustworthy’ part of the UI, rather than possibly part of the page.)

If I hit the ‘Edit Options…’ button, I get this:

A simple-enough dialog containing the list of sites permitted to install extensions. update.mozilla.org is in there by default, and I’ve added texturizer.net so I can install from their more extensive list of older extensions. The address of the current site has been dropped in automatically.

To permit the site, I have to hit ‘Allow’, then ‘OK’. So I do that, and hit the ‘install’ link on the webpage again:

And there’s the Software Installation dialog. Note the red Unsigned warning, the proportion of text that is a warning about installing bad stuff (fully half!), and — this is interesting — a greyed-out ‘Install’ button.

The button is on a timer — it becomes clickable after 2 seconds. This, presumably, is to ensure that people read the dialog! Reportedly, users no longer read dialogs, instead hitting OK on every dialog that appears. In my opinion, this is arguably due to ‘the boy who cried wolf’ syndrome: by default, MSIE and older Mozilla versions will ask all sorts of stupid questions about ‘are you sure you want to send stuff on the intarweb?‘ whenever you use Google. If anything is guaranteed to induce dialog fatigue, it’s that feature.

(Update: actually, that’s not the reason. Reportedly, it’s a workaround for a couple of social-engineering attacks, whereby an attacker could persuade the user to type a word ending in ‘Y’, and time the dialog to appear just before ‘Y’ is typed — causing the keyboard shortcut for ‘Yes’ to take effect; or persuade the user to double-click in the right spot, and similarly time the dialog to appear in the right place, in time for the second click. Still, I maintain the measure is useful to deal with the ‘dialog fatigue’ issue too. ;) Thanks to Smyler and Rod for pointing this out.)

I would have gone further:

  • the ‘a software install was blocked’ page element should have an indication that it’s ‘trustworthy content’
  • both dialogs should default to ‘Cancel’, to avoid users deliberately pressing ‘OK’
  • I would possibly require a ‘yes, I read this’ tickbox to be ticked before the software is installed.

Interesting though. This is the way internet-facing UIs are going to have to develop, in my opinion.

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More Thoughts on GMail

Mail: I’ve been playing around with GMail a bit more recently. They’ve fixed the issues they had with Firefox and keyboard control, and it is nice.

Threading: since I plan to bother a few open-source MUA developers ;), I’ve written up a thorough analysis of their ‘conversation’ model, with its ‘collapsable history’, archive-not-delete approach, etc. Take a look, if you’re curious.

HTML: one feature that no-one’s commented on, is that GMail does not create HTML mail — all mail composed through their composer is sent as text/plain only.

This is very interesting, because it suits me just fine. HTML mail causes so many more problems than it solves, especially when full-featured web browser components are used to display it, IMO. I get to see the security exploits this enables, every day in my anti-spam work.

But it’s also very significant that nobody else has commented on it – nobody misses it!

Phantom Labels: another interesting thing I’ve noted: sometimes a mail will appear in your Inbox with a ’spam’ label, even though you’ve never defined one. It’s not in the ‘Spam’ folder; it’s in your inbox.

Aaron has a good theory on what this is, and I think he’s right — he suggests it’s when ‘ the two emails are in a conversation (same subject); one is marked as spam, one isn’t. So the conversation (which is what appears in your inbox) gets two tags: Spam, and Inbox. So when viewing the list it looks like it gets the Spam tag.’

Also, while I’m here — details on LiveJournal’s distributed filesystem, MogileFS, which apparently ‘will be open source’. Link via acme.

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Future Firefox Features

Web: More on the Firefox crappy-movie-now-web-browser thing, from Chris Blizzard:

  • A mind-controlled UI: but it only works if you think in russian!
  • Flashback mode: whenever you hear a helicopter overhead the browser will
    • redirect all page loads to web.archive.org, circa 5 years ago.
    • Stealth mode: using specially malformed headers, Firefox will load your web pages and web servers will be unable to log your vists.
    • Mach 6 Technology: advanced compression algorithms will make the web faster than it’s ever been before!
    • Arctic compliant: you can land firefox on an ice floe in the middle of the north atlantic. Not sure why you would need this, but hey, we had some extra bandwith.

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Firebird now Firefox

Web: Donncha notes that Mozilla Firebird has been renamed ‘Firefox’. Retro cruddy 80’s Cold War movie reference? check!

I like it. In fact, I’m looking forward to Linux kernel 2.6.2 ‘Red Dawn’.

BTW, my current favourite Firebird^H^H^H^Hfox extension: Session Saver. Load and save the current list of open tabs, and have them automatically saved when you quit the browser. Given that I often have a few tabs on stuff I’m researching, leaving them until I’m a bit less busy (which can take days!), this fits perfectly with my modus operandi.

Funny: This is GREAT!

And if that’s too much product placement for you, there’s Students for an Orwellian Society: ‘Because 2004 is 20 years too late.’

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