A lovely new extension/addon for Firefox called Operator has just been announced over at Mozilla Labs. Its basic functionality is similar to Tails and Tails Export in that it detects microformats on web pages and allows you to do “stuff” with them but it looks like the author, Michael Kaply at IBM, has big plans for Operator and felt that he could not achieve that with the existing tools.
Some of the things you can do include:
- Send the phone number of your favorite pizza place from Yahoo! Local to your address book, without having to type anything
- If you view an event at Upcoming.org you can easily add the event to your calendar to see if you are free, or map the location of the event to see where it will take place
- Navigate from blog post tags to the same tags on Flickr.
- Push coordinates of geo-tagged pictures to Google maps.
- View and validate the microformats source
This really is a superb piece of software and like Live Clipboard, shows more of the practical possibilities presented by microformats. It’s a lot more than a nice way of marking up data.
Firefox, IBM, microformats, Operator
14 Comments
Terrific catch Conor. 2007 will surely be a breakout year for microformats.
It’s even better than I first thought for general users.
For example, visit a blog and Operator gives a menu of every tag on that page along with the option to find that tag on delicious, upcoming, flickr or Technorati. Just lovely, simple, useful ways of making your browsing experience more interactive.
It’s got some issues though. When I visit the LouderVoice homepage I can one-click-add the contact info to my Nokia Contacts editor. That’s great (even though you’ve only got Company name and email in there
But when I visit this blog page it show me that there are 10 contact options (in brackets) and all of them appear blank.
Still it’s a nice start.
That’s weired - after posting that comment there was no Export Contact option anymore! So, this is how to reproduce - first visit the LouderVoice homepage and then this blog page.
D’oh, it’s obviously because it’s detecting a vcard for each post on the main blog page and detecting on individual post/comment pages. Sorry, I’m a bit slow today….
Very strange all the same. This blog uses a theme that emits hAtom, hence the hCards that you are seeing. Not sure about the glitches. I’ll have a poke around.
Sadly I had to disable Operator - not only did I find the tab switching slowdown (as reported on the Operator webpage) too annoying but it also caused a script error message to appear on each Google search I did. I’ll definitely re-enable once those problems are fixed.
Ahh, I only sussed the slowdown thing earlier today and forgot to check if it was a common problem. Didn’t see the script error problem.
Dammit the Script Error is back again so I might have to excuse Operator….. very weird though…. I can’t figure out how I wasn’t having the problem until shortly after I installed Operator and (temporarily) resolved it by removing Operator.
check your prefs.js and see if there are any Operator specific entries which you could delete by hand.
I think I have the performance problems worked out in the next update. I was going through the document multiple times unnecessarily.
I’m really interested in this script error though. What exactly was the text of the error?
Thanks Michael, I’ve emailed you the script error and noted again that it may just be a coincidence I started seeing it just after installing Operator as disabling it only worked for a short time. Will be interesting to know what you find. Keep up the great work.
Just a quick note to complement Michael on the follow up investigation and communication. I have since determined that that the fault in fact lay with the Google Calendar Quick Add add-on -
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=503680&sid=c5666031a16b805ec4e75c5e2903c6c7
So Operator gets reinstalled today
And according to his blog, v0.6 should be coming tomorrow and sounds like it has a big improvement in performance.