Wish: AutoComplete add-in for Word that suggests words from current document

UltraEdit has a nice feature in which when you press Ctrl-Space, an auto-complete list is opened, suggesting you to complete the word you just started to type. The nice thing is that its suggestions come not only from the list of keywords of the edited file’s language, but also from the actual words in the file (actually, the words above you current location).

This is great as you often use the same words several times in a file, and it can be handy for your editing tool to use that and suggest options from your current work, which probably knows the words in the domain more then any general keywords dictionary file.

I really wish someone would have written an add-in to Microsoft Word that does it. I might get to it some time when I have time (as if… ha).

Greasemonkey wish: Auto-update user scripts

I’m the kind of guy who likes to know when a new version of a software I use is released, and update whenever I can (I guess this is why I installed Office 2007 when it was in Beta). This is why I use Update Notifier Firefox extension, which automatically checks for Firefox add-ons when Firefox starts.

I think Greasemonkey should evolve to support such mechanism for user scripts – each user script should be able to mention its current version and its URL as part of its metadata and then Greasemonkey can periodically check if the user script is updated. As it is now, I might find a script on userscripts.org and install it, but I won’t know that the script was later improved by its author. I think this would be great.

update: while wondering around userscripts.org, I found this script which seems to do what I want. I’ll look into it tomorrow.

Post-Subscription Disorder

On regular basis, I add new items to two sites on a regular basis – Bloglines (my RSS feed reader) and del.icio.us (my bookmark keeper).

When I subscribe to a new blog in Bloglines (see below how I do it), Bloglines takes me to my feeds page at Bloglines, and after I add a new URL to del.icio.us (using the Post to del.icio.us bookmarklet), del.icio.us takes me back to the site I just added.

I would like it to be the other way around:

When I subscribe to a site/blog, this is probably after I took a quick glance at it, and decided its interesting, and after I subscribed, I would probably want to continue reading it (or close the window). Besides, my first open tab is the Bloglines tab, and I always keep it open, so I don’t need another Bloglines tab.

On the other hand, when I add a URL to del.icio.us, that’s usually after I’m more or less done with it for now, and wanted to file it for later use. Since I don’t usually have a del.icio.us tab open, I would like to be taken to my del.icio.us main page, where I can do various actions like seeing what other bookmarked pages I have that are related to the new page I just added, or seeing how many other people bookmarked this page, or taking a look at the pages I added recently, to see if any of them might be of interest now, e.g. because I wanted to e-mail it to someone but didn’t do it yet for some reason.

Once I have time, I might look into these sites and see if I can write a user script that can change this annoying post-subscription behavior.

PS 1:

I used to subscribe to new blogs in Bloglines using the Subscribe button in Google Toolbar, but as I’m writing this post, I’ve realized that when I do it, it always opens the subscribe window in a new tab, which is not always what I want. I think I’ll switch to using the RSS icon next to the down arrow of Firefox’s address combo-box, where left click open the subscribe window in the same tab, and middle click opens it in a new tab.

PS 2:

Why Bloglines? I tried Google Reader in its first version, and didn’t really like it, so I reverted back to Bloglines, which I really liked. When the second version of Google Reader was released, and everyone said it’s awesome, I tried to use it, but it remembered all my old subscriptions from my previous trial, and the option to delete them all and start over didn’t really work. While writing this post I tried it again, and this time it worked, so I might give it another try some day. In fact, I do like the frames structure of Bloglines, so Google will have to really impress me for me to make the move.

The one application I miss

There is really one application I recently miss – a task bar fish-eye magnifier.

I tend to use the Quick Launch toolbar in the task bar a lot. I even set it in a top, separate line to start all sorts of macros and applications that do quick handy things for me. It turns out that although I know how to find my way in Windows using the keyboard, I’m not the kind of guy who would use Launchy for these kind of things.

The problem is, I always find myself looking for the icon I need. What I would like is that when I’m approaching the task bar area with the mouse, icons will start growing, with optionally displaying their description, so it is easier to choose. Something like what Alexei did, or what the dojo toolkit has.

I know that there is a Yahoo! Widget that does it, and also sTabLauncher, but they are both too large, and are placed it in a different location on the screen, which interferes with my day-to-day work. I want an application that acts directly on the Quick Launch toolbar and other toolbars in the task bar.

I might end up writing it someday…