Evolution of the launcher?

[s.newave]

Mouser, not sure how powerful the upcoming html viewer mode will be but i just came across a promising launcher called Skylight which has a really cool youtube search:

http://www.candylabs...ht-screenshot-10.jpg

Even though it come off as a bit flashy it does have a certain wow factor and being able to do this with a combination of the html mode and some type of web page scraper would be amazing!!! As mentioned before you could use it for things like movie reviews, wiki searches, rss feeds, weather reports and on and on....

I think this is the logical next step for a launcher type application such as FARR which I have come to think of as more of an interface into my pc or a first point of entry rather than just a launcher. Being able to access quick info such as this without having to launch another application and literally at your fingertips whenever you need it would be an evolutionary feature.

[kartal]

Skylight constantly crashes on my xp pro

[mouser]

it's an interesting direction to purse -- sort of an alternative window into the web.
the html display mode will be available this month.. perhaps i should think of providing some asynchronous web grabbing/scraping functionality built in that plugins can ask FARR to perform for them.. would make it a little easier for plugin writers to do stuff like this consistently and seamlessly.

[s.newave]

sort of an alternative window into the web.

-mouser (May 23, 2008, 12:15 PM)

Exactly!

perhaps i should think of providing some asynchronous web grabbing/scraping functionality built in that plugins can ask FARR to perform for them.. would make it a little easier for plugin writers to do stuff like this consistently and seamlessly.

-mouser (May 23, 2008, 12:15 PM)

Now you're talking

Oh and as Kartal mentions this app is still very much a beta and by no means close to a FARR replacement but nevertheless does have some unique features that FARR could implement.

[kartal]

Is it under active developement? I would not mind using multiple launchers. I use launchy and Farr together at the moment.

[kartal]

I know you have commented on this one but in case it is forgotten I want to remind again. http://www.webscrape.com/ can open up alot of possibilities with Farr. Maybe this app can use to create results for Farr memo or html view.

it's an interesting direction to purse -- sort of an alternative window into the web.
the html display mode will be available this month.. perhaps i should think of providing some asynchronous web grabbing/scraping functionality built in that plugins can ask FARR to perform for them.. would make it a little easier for plugin writers to do stuff like this consistently and seamlessly.

-mouser (May 23, 2008, 12:15 PM)

[vitalyb]

I know you have commented on this one but in case it is forgotten I want to remind again. http://www.webscrape.com/ can open up alot of possibilities with Farr. Maybe this app can use to create results for Farr memo or html view.

-kartal (May 23, 2008, 03:59 PM)

WebScape is a nice tool. However, it uses regular expression. A more natural approach for web scraping would be using xml/xpath. Firefox also includes a nice add-in called "XPather" that helps you extract almost any element easily. For example, the title of this topic is:

[Select]

/html/body/div[4]/div[@id='bodyarea']/table[2]/tbody/tr/td[@id='top_subject']

[mouser]

vitalyb that is a nice idea, it never occurred to me but i can see why such an approach would be useful.
ideally i think it would be nice to support both methods of extracting info (regex and dom/xml/xpath).