On Apr 14, 2011, at 5:17 PM, Henning Jungkurth wrote:
> - It'd definitely need some mechanism to eliminate duplicates. Many
> people who use several browsers sync the bookmarks between them. So
> having the same bookmark three times in QS, from Safari, from Firefox,
> and from Chrome would be very annoying.
The way things are now, each browser plug-in provides a catalog preset for
bookmarks. If all your bookmarks are synchronized, you could just uncheck all
but one.
> - The "Current Web Page" could of course be combined too. But if
> you're using two (or more) browsers at the same time, which current
> web page would be used? The one from Safari or the one from Firefox. I
> would guess the one from the most recently used browser. Or maybe the
> one from the more frequently used browser?
Before I go further, note that there has never been something like “Current Web
Page” for Firefox. Only for Safari and OmniWeb. They use AppleScript, which
doesn’t appear to be an option with Firefox. I won’t say it’s impossible
though. If Firefox is writing history in real-time as you browse and you could
figure out how to parse it, you could get the “last viewed” page, which is
close (but there’d be no way to tell if it was actually up at the moment). A
lot of people would probably be happy if you figure it out.
It should be possible to ask the OS for the bundle ID of the default browser.
That’s probably the one to use if you’re trying to be “smart”. But then how do
you translate that to a plug-in? Even if we moved “Current Web Page” into the
core application, I don’t think it should know how to talk to every browser, so
it would have to hand the work off to a plug-in somehow. That might be
possible, but then what if you want the current page from a non-default
browser? Perhaps the “Current Web Page” proxy could have children (when you
right arrow into it) for all browsers that support it.
Here’s my suggestion: We standardize on a name (“Current Web Page” or “Current
URL”) for this proxy object in all browser plug-ins. We could either append
something to the label, so you’d have “Current Web Page (Safari)”, “Current Web
Page (Chrome)”, etc. or we could make the label identical for all of them and
differentiate them using the icon and the details (the second line you
sometimes see under the label).
If there’s one you prefer and use more often, Quicksilver will learn this and
it will become a de facto default. And because the names are so similar, if you
do want a different one now and then, they should all appear just below in the
results.
This doesn’t require users to somehow discover that they can right-arrow into
it to see alternatives and it doesn’t require Quicksilver to make any
assumptions about which browser you meant.
And finally, this can be implemented today with some small alterations the
plug-ins*. We wouldn’t have to restructure anything in the core application. I
was going to make a small tweak to the OmniWeb plug-in anyway. Might as well do
this.
Thoughts?
* As far as I can tell, it isn’t currently possible to set the details on a
proxy object from the plug-in, but the icon can be changed.
> - For email-handling in QS there is a mediator (QSMailMediator), that
> handles the common email actions ("Email Item...", "Email to..."...).
> That might be a good place to start looking for ideas on how to design
> that.
I think those actions are more akin to opening URLs, which the OS already knows
how to handle. The mail application equivalent of what we’re talking about
would be more like reading in contacts and mailboxes.
--
Rob McBroom
<http://www.skurfer.com/>
