This weekend I spent some time assembling new playlists with Zune 3.0 for an upcoming trip. I was visiting a # of websites to look at playlists (e.g. XMFans.com) and an annoyance was the number of steps required to copy/paste between the browser and Zune. So I wrote an Internet Explorer 8 Accelerator to help simplify and reduce the amount of copy/paste actions. According to the IE8 website, “Accelerators let you efficiently complete your everyday browsing activities like mapping directions, translating words, emailing your friends, and more in just a few mouse clicks.” In building the accelerator, I discovered a wealth of detail available in Zune Marketplace on the web – you can sample music, read artists bios, browse charts, comments, similar artists and more.
Install Zune Accelerator for IE8 (Beta 2)
To activate the accelerator, highlight the text on a page (Left Click+Drag). You’ll see the new accelerator icon (in blue in image to right). When you click on this, it will launch the accelerator window.
I’m sure there are better ways to do this, but it was fun and useful enough for my needs. Other Zune accelerators tend to break out accelerators by Artist, Song, etc. instead of aggregating into one. Maybe I’ll try and build an IE8 Web Slice for Zune Social next. More details on writing IE8 Accelerators is available here.
For more accelerators, check out the IE8 Accelerator Gallery
3 responses to “TOOL: IE8 Web Accelerator for Zune”
Sean,
I think Accelerators are a great way to solve the great number of steps required to copy/paste between the browser and Zune. Thx for posting your solution. As a general comment, I predict "selection-based search" is a new category we will be seeing over lots of applications, not just IE8 Accelerators. The very best implementation I have seen of mouse-based search is a program called KallOut. Check it out at http://www.kallout.com
I love the Kallout application (and it works over all IE and Firefox and Office). My favorite feature is that KallOut guesses which online service to send your mouse-based search query to, so the logical selection is always the first one I see. For example, highlite an address and it finds a Google map, highlite a topic and it finds the wikipedia article. Great stuff!
ANyway, I personally see a bigger trend toward mouse-only search. I think your copy/paste is a great example. Just FYI.
-JK
For your web slice project, you could use aggiorno’s Web Slice aggiorning available on their latest release, I’d love to hear ur comments on that.
aggiorno is a plugin for Visual Studio that automates a lot of tasks for Web devs… maybe you would like to give it a shot!
http://www.aggiorno.com
http://www.aggiorno.com/aggiornings-ie-internet-explorer.aspx
Cheers,
G.
Dude, awesome accelerator. I’ve got a few up on my site now as well. I’ll probably be using this one a lot on myspace.