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Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Wikipedia @ click?

« on: January 09, 2006, 09:08 AM »

Hello,

let me begin by saying that I've tried to do this myself, but I guess I'm not qualified/experienced enough yet.
I'd posted the following over at the AutoHotkey forums, but it didn't elicit any response.
Thus I thought you guys here might be interested in the idea:

A friend just told me that Babylon Translator now offers a glossary that's connected to Wikipedia.
This means that you just have to middle-click any word or phrase and Babylon will display the respective Wikipedia article:


So I thought, why spend 50 $ on Babylon; this can be done with AHK as well - or can it?
Here's what I think the program should do:

• First, middle-clicking a word or phrase marks it as the keyword to look for. This means there needs to be a way to somehow recognize the text under the mouse pointer. (I've considered using copy & paste for this - mark the phrase, then middle-click to copy the word/phrase to the clipboard - but not all programs use the same hotkey for that... )
• Then, the appropriate URL is composed (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%keyword%).*
  
• Finally, the contents of that website (or part of it) should be displayed in a small window (similiar to that screenshot above). Opening the URL in the web browser would pretty much obviate the need for a program like this. However, writing a HTML parser is obviously not an option - maybe the existing IE rendering engine could be used (never done that before)? Otherwise, all the HTML tags would have to be stripped and the contents displayed as plain text...

* This means that not only Wikipedia, but any website with the keyword(s) in the URL could be accessed (cf. Firefox's quick searches)!?

Sounds like a good idea? Any suggestions on how to best translate this idea into AHK code? (I'm currently working on a little proof-of-concept script to see what can and can't be done - and how much effort it'd require.)

btw: I hope there aren't any copyright issues in accessing a website like that!?


PS: What would be a good name for such a script/program? I've thought of something like Information@click, but that's a little too corny I guess...

-Ace_NoOne

2

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: creating HTML lists from URLs in clipboard

« on: December 14, 2005, 05:43 AM »

Hello there,

I guess many people know this problem: You often stumble across articles online which you don't have time to read immediately (e.g. when checking your RSS feeds at work).
So I came up with the idea to have a tiny program that scans the clipboard for URLs and then assembles them in a simple HTML file. So whenever you come across such an article (or anything else of interest), you just copy the URL to the clipboard and it will be added to your toRead.html.

In fact, a friend had already written such a program for me (in C/C++), but it's got some flaws (e.g. not recognizing FTP links) and missing features (e.g. no way to delete an entry without manually re-creating the whole list).
I've also tried to create such a program myself using AutoHotkey, but I guess I'm not gifted enough to finish it...

However, if you decide to take on this idea, I could provide you with the source codes of both these attempts.
In that case, I could also give you with a list of features to consider.

Comments are appreciated!