Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Google thumbnails for AvantBrowser, Maxthon & Co

I've completely re-written LostGoggles. There's not so much new on the surface, but a bit more under the hood that you'll see in upcoming versions. LostGoggles 1.5 builds the foundation for many new features that I'm planning.

Coming to a browser near you
LostGoggles is now a background application instead of a Browser Helper Object (BHO); this will no longer trigger alarms of several Anti-ParanoiaSpyware products, and it will not crash Internet Explorer if something goes wrong (as it did sometimes when viewing PDF files). It's also a more elegant approach than a BHO.

The greatest benefit though is that LostGoggles 1.5 now works with all IE-based browsers, such as AvantBroswer, Maxthon, SlimBrowser or NetCaptor.

Towards version 2.0
Adding features is one thing, but adding them in an intuitive, subtle way is another. I don't want LostGoggles to become too bloated; I've been working on many new things, and I'm now looking to integrate these without making it too complex and messing up the look & general user experience.
  • Thumbnails on MSN search
  • Thumbnails on Yahoo
  • Cross-Browser - read: Firefox- support (more and more)
  • Thumbnail Plug-Ins
    extract context sensitive thumbnails from web pages, like photos from news articles; this already works server-based, but I want it to be done on the client because of the bandwidth and CPU load this would need
  • "Live-Info" Plug-Ins
    extract short info "tags", just like LostGoggles' Amazon integration
  • Thumbnail Zooming
  • Preferences (choose thumbnails size, enable zooming)

Generally, I got a lot of inspiration from Klipfolio, and I'd like to think of LostGoggles as the Klipfolio for search. Klipfolio lets you extract information from various data sources - it's like a simple and neat RSS aggregator. I really like the whole Klipfolio Universe, with their API, terminology ("KlipFood" :) ) etc.

Download LostGoggles 1.5 Beta

This release, too, is still experimental Beta software; it's even more beta than the 1.0 release, so it's not available from the LostGoggles.com web site. Please give it a try; the installer will (=should) automatically remove the previous version of LostGoggles. I've tested it with different flavours of Windows XP, so if anyone has a non-XP version of Windows, please let me know if and how it works (or doesn't).

Enjoy!

Download LostGoggles 1.5 (<400k)

posted by Andreas @ 2:14 PM Comments (3)