I have been tasked with developing an innovative tool this year. My idea is an auto-hide window that, regardless of what application is being used, sits permanently snapped to the Windows desktop (to the taskbar or any of the other 3 edges) and displays content from an Oracle d/b and gives access to (and will open if not already open) web pages, PDFs, docs, etc. It will be used by scientists doing research. It will be a tool that will have potential general utility but will be used specifically to get immediate access to information e.g. copy a word/phrase from a Word/Excel/PDF document, open the auto-hide window and paste it into a search box there, and then click to search for it on Google, OR see something of interest in a printed magazine, open the auto-hide window, click on a preselected favorite database (being the content from the Oracle d/b mentioned above), and then go and search in that database for it. The trouble is, I'm not a programmer and don't know where to start. I would need to contract a programmer to do this but don't know what skills would be needed (C#, java, etc?).
My idea came to me after seeing the Snagit OneClick auto-hide window. If anyone knows that, they should pretty well understand my idea and requirements.
Any help with identifying the type of programming required, background stuff to read, other examples of this type of auto-hide window, etc. would be most welcome!
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The context is that in a Xamarin.Forms project, I want to right-click and add an item from VS in the usual project content menu as maybe an entry called "Add Image Asset", let's say a raster or SVG image, and have it programmatically add those to the resources folder in Android and the Assets.xcassets in the IOS and Mac projects. Maybe it could even size or resize the input image or vector assets to fit into different dpi sizes, which would cut down on a lot of front-end redundancy.
So, an extension would have to be created I would think.
On VS for Windows this isn't such a problem, but be it that the Mac version is Monodevelop-based, is what I want to do even possible, and how?
Firstly this is something that is built-in into MFractor so you might want to take a look (you can request a free trial to see how it works). If you are not willing to spend money on such a tool then I believe you can try writing your own extension. This article should be a good starting point.
If I were you I would try using MFractor with a trial license so you can decide whether it's worth the money or not. In my opinion, it's a must in XF development (it has so many nice features), but I can understand that there are companies that are not willing to spend money on it. If you are interested you can contact Matthew for more details.
I am on a Chromebook controlled by an administration that has disabled the usual Chrome inspection. I am also not allowed to take it out of this administrative lock.
Is there a website available that would allow me to inspect element as a part of that website?
Is there some other way for me to be able to access the console log of a page?
I just need to do some debugging of a program, but I can't find out how to tell if there's an error or not since I can't access the console of the page.
No, there is no site or other method available. Usually business and school administration offices disable this on a Chromebook because they give the device to you to use for work, therefore disabling access to certain websites and features. They don't want you to mess around with their devices.
There are 3 solutions to this;
Buy a personal Chromebook.
Confront the administrator about enabling this feature.
Use any Windows or Mac computer, because they allow Inspect Element on desktops for certain reasons.
I hoped this answered your question.
A lot of schools that provide chromebooks or iPads like to put restrictions on them which include:
blocking websites
not allowing certain device features (like playing the dinosaur game when you don't have wifi, inspecting, viewing the source of a webpage, bookmarklets, google assistant, etc.)
and more
I know this from experience, as I am literally answering your question on a school chromebook, since Stack Overflow is luckily not blocked.
There are some ways to fix this.
Reach out to the help desk or IT person at your school/district. Ask them to allow inspecting web pages on your chromebook. However, you must have a legitmate reason for wanting the Inspect feature, like not because its fun how you can edit a website or whatever, but a reason similar to your reason.
I just need to do some debugging of a program, but I can't find out how to tell if there's an error or not since I can't access the console of the page.
I'm pretty sure that the help desk/IT at your school will allow you to have the inspect feature because you have a pretty good reason.
Other ways to inspect the website that you wanna inspect are:
Inspecting the website on a personal chromebook,Mac, Windows, or other type of computer. Restrictions cannot be put on Macs or Windows computers for inspect, so if a school gave out windows computers, the students could use inspect.
Like many web developers, I maintain numerous profiles in Google Chrome so as to test web applications. When doing these tests, it is essential to rapidly determine which profile I am in when interacting with Chrome. I depended on the classic Chrome avatar menu to signal the current profile. For months now, Chrome has defaulted to a newer profile menu that only showed the current user's name in text (no avatar image). Until today, it was possible to go back to using the classic avatar menu by navigating to chrome://flags and then disabling Enable New Profile Management System. Now, doing this has no effect. I was wondering if perhaps there is some other way to enable the classic avatar menu so that my web development tests can proceed as before.
This is unfortunately a design decision by Google, and it looks like they're sticking to it. When it initially happened, I (like you) set the flag & was able to use legacy icons, but as of this morning the flag itself has been disabled.
Further reading (follow the links to related issues): https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=512699
I have no idea how much good it will do, but starring the issue and leaving a polite, detailed comment on issue #451920 is a good place to start.
Where I work, we use a multitude of various services such as Confluence, JIRA, Bamboo, Mercurial, and various others, that all have a web interface that our engineers can access through the corporate intranet.
However, many in our staff aren't directly network wizzes and having these services spread out confuses them. What I want to do is to set up a central server from which they can branch out and find all other web interfaces that relate to their work.
The first thought i had was to create a light web page with frames, using a top bar where the user can quick-navigate to any of the services available - but this creates an additional problem where i can't email someone a direct link to a page within a service, because it will remove that frame (and confusion will arise again when they see there's no way to navigate by clicks).
Is there some best practice to put this all together? Some hints? ideas?
First, stay far far away from frames. They annoy users something fierce (partially because of that not-able-to-bookmark issue you just spoke of.)
You could create a small webpage that could load within a popup window, which contained dropdown-nav links to all of the various tools. If you had the resources, you could even make it so that users could customize this window - so that they can add bookmarks to the tools they use the most.
But that does bring up the question...I'm guessing your staff isn't savvy enough users to know how to use bookmarks? Or keep going to a central link-repository page? Whatever solution you're thinking of, get input from a sampling of your user base, and find out how they'd actually prefer to work. They're the ones who are going to be using the tools, after all. Keep them involved, solicit their input, do "hallway usability tests" or any tool you end up building might be as useful as a chocolate teapot.
I'm looking for some advice on what I "should" research for a particular project I've been asked to keep in mind. I've been doing so for roughly 3 days by exploring various Google technologies, but none of them seems quite right.
I need to put together something for gmail that's roughly equivalent to something I've put together for Windows Outlook. I'll explain in brief therefor what I've done for Outlook users, to give you a feel for what I'm looking for. I put together an Outlook C# AddIn that when loaded by Outlook on startup adds a number of clickable tabs, buttons, and other assorted interface elements to the Outlook interface. When you click them the C# code in my Add-In is invoked in various ways to carry out various activities, like archiving the email message that's currently selected in a remote database managed by one of our web applications. It does this by calling a variety of Outlook C# APIs that are available to any loaded AddIn, to extract or manipulate various Outlook "objects". Another thing it does on a button click is bring up a web browser the AddIn creates from a .Net class "webbrowser control" instance, essentially adding chrome to the IE "engine". It also adds what it needs to to the DOM of that web browser to make a large number of Add-In C# functions callable by javascript code that might be running in pages of that browser, essentially giving our web applications a way to "ask" my AddIn to create Outlook contacts, tasks, messages etc on behalf of that application. The gist of it is that the UI I add to the Outlook application can be used to make various web service calls to our applications (based on the state of various Outlook "objects" made visible/manageable by way of the Outlook C# API), and the state of the Outlook application can be manipulated by javascript code running in web application pages that happen to be loaded in the web browser it creates.
I need to support "similar" functionality with respect to the altogether different gmail beast (rather than a Windows application a browser based web app). I feel a bit like I've been spinning in circles the last few days, while investigating. I began by researching gmail Sidebar and Contextual gadgets, to add some roughly equivalent UI of my own to gmail, but found fairly quickly that I can't really get to any gmail APIs using them, only try to shoehorn what I've got into a set of triggered gmail "behaviors" supported by contextual gadgets, which I came to realize isn't really sufficient to support what I want. Eventually I navigated my way to the set of developer pages describing Google Apps Script supported functionally, which seemed for a time like "the way to go" to provide me with hooks into gmail APIs. I played a bit with them, making a web app script to collect the subject lines of all my gmail messages and dump them into a UI also built by the script, just to get an experimental quick feel for how things fit together. The script works, but it seems pretty slow, taking roughly a minute to collect and display just 57 email subject lines. And I can't really figure out how to get any script built UI into the gmail user interface. I tried building a side bar gadget with the URL of my app script referenced (with no HTML or javascript in the content tag body at all). An area is allocated to the gadget ok, but my script UI never appears in it. After playing a bit unsuccessfully to get my script to run in an iframe in a completely different context, just experimenting again to see what I might be able to do, I'm beginning to get the impression that some security related caveat prevents it from building/displaying its interface in either an iframe or a gmail side bar gadget, though perhaps I'm just missing some essential piece of information.
My question is a bit big I know, but "should" I be looking to other Google technologies to build the sort of thing I have in mind, or am I "roughly" following a tenable track. I'm looking for some rough architectural advice I guess, some hints about what maybe I should further explore.
With Google Apps Script you cannot add anything to the Gmail interface. Putting it simply, it will not do what you want.
Now back to your problem, if sidebar and contextual gadgets are not enough for you. The only solution I see where you can really manipulate the page is via an add-on/extension/script installed on the users browser.
This approach is powerful, in the way that you can change the page as you like, but has its shortcomings as well. First, and more obvious, it's somewhat browser dependent and installed locally on a browser. Meaning that if the user switch computers or browsers, he'll need to re-install your add-on.
Also, you're somewhat dependent on gmail's "internal" structure. I say "somewhat" because that depends on how you coded your app. But they may make a change and break your app instantly, without any notice, since gmail's html-css structure is not a "published API".
Well, that's my 2 cents. I hope it helps.
Use JSF and rich faces. this can give u a google gmail like looks and development with this is very easy and fast.
Happy Coding