Wil Tan » gears

GearSaver v0.4

wil — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 07:05:46 +0000

I’m pleased to announce GearSaver v0.4. This version has been tested under Firefox 2.0.0.6 and IE7 on Windows with Gears installed. Most importantly, I’ve finally ironed out all the bugs in the various usage scenarios x both browsers. The usage scenarios I’m talking about are:

By including the script on the page
By using it as a bookmarklet

Along with it, I’ve put up a proper page for it: GearSaver Home.

Here’s a screenshot:

If you’ve tried GearSaver before and it didn’t work for you, I would encourage you to give it another try and submit a comment here.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

GearSaver Reloaded

wil — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 06:34:09 +0000

The GearSaver Bookmarklet was not that useful since there was no easy way to use the saved data. Since this is an itch that I’d really like to be able to scratch, I reached further and improved on it to the point that I can now write this post in a GearSaver-enabled textarea. Added features are:

uses jQuery – I have no intention of working around browser DOM quirks more than I already have to
displays previously saved versions
ability to preview a version and apply to current textarea content
ability to delete versions

Eventually, I hope to be able to provide the script as:

ad-hoc inclusion into any page – this already works in the current version
as a bookmarklet – so that you can enable any page
as a greasemonkey script – so that you can automatically have it turned on on the sites that you want it

So, without further ado, you can try it out…

1. Here’s a textarea

2. Make sure you have Google Gears installed.

3. Click here to enable GearSaver.

4. Gears will ask you whether to allow http://dready.org/ to write data

Please report any bugs / suggestions.

Update 20070812: Updated to use new and improved version 0.4

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

GearSaver Bookmarklet

wil — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 08:04:55 +0000

Google Gears is one of the most exciting technologies to be released IMO. It will push the web 2.0 envelope further and bring interactive web applications to the next level — offline! Well, not just offline, the whole point is that you can design your application synchronization strategy.

I’ve been experimenting with it a bit and it’s surprisingly (Javascript) developer friendly. The end product is a bookmarklet I call GearSaver. It’s really a shell that injects the gearsaver.js script hosted on my server into the current page that you’re viewing. It saves all your textareas (be it a blog post or wiki page that you’re editing, any multi-line text box in a form) into Gears.

This is pre-pre-pre alpha and is only a proof-of-concept, I haven’t tested it in IE and there isn’t a way to view the saved results yet. You can, however, use the DB query tool included in the gears samples and select the textarea table in the gearsaver database.

This is personally very useful to me because many a time I’ve lost valuable work in a textarea upon submitting a page and the network goes down. What this does is that it saves a version of each textarea found on the page, indexed by the URL and its xpath. It is also timestamped. My next enhancement would be to have a pull-down menu on each textarea to allow you to revert to older versions.

Without further ado:

Add the following bookmark and use it on any page: Launch GearSaver

Updated 20080812: bookmarklet to use version 0.4.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.