OUseful Info

Greasemonkey for Rapid Prototyping

Ijust couldn;t resist posting this - news of a Greasemonkey script that will add Google reader into Gmail from Reader's own developer:

A lot of people have remarked on the similarities between the new Reader interface and Gmail's. With this in mind, I've created a simple Greasemonkey script that adds a "Feeds" in Gmail. When clicked, Reader's list view is loaded on the right.

You may wonder why I felt the need to write a Greasemonkey script for my own product. The answer is that integrations are hard and generally require a lot of effort before you can even determine if they are worthwhile. Greasemonkey lets you experiment with UI concepts with minimal effort necessary from either team (I had to make exactly one change to Reader to better support this script, and that was the ability to force list view to be used, even if expanded view is normally selected). I can't really say what, if any, our integration plans are, but enough users have asked for something like this that I thought writing the script was the most expedient way to provide this (unofficial) feature.

Way to go.......this is similar to the reasoning behind my own Greasemonkey scratchpad for the Technology Short Course Programme delivery engine. It provides an opportunity to try stuff out on the live site without needing access to it in any other than than via a browser.

There are always niggles with this approach though - like the lack of sensible class and id attributes, and pages that don't validate (both of which make accurate DOM traversal harder than it should be...). But the upside is things that can be demoed as working on the live site, which at leasts gets round the "can't be done" arguments, if not the 'why bother?' ones.... ;-)

It's also a good way of finding out for real whether arguably sensible innovations don't work at all, for example on grounds of styling, usability or just plain irrelevance. Oops...