Use ‘GreaseFire’ to discover GreaseMonkey scripts

If you find a feature to be missing on your favorite site, you can request for the same from site admin / service provider. But, the process may take some time before you get the feature. GreaseMonkey is the way to go if you want to get it yourself quickly.

GreaseMonkey

GreaseMonkey allows you to customize any website to your taste. It was originally written as a Firefox add-on by Aaron Boodman (@aboodman) (currently working with Google). Eventually, Chrome 4 added support for GreaseMonkey scripts. A GreaseMonkey (popularly known as GM or user scripts) script is a JavaScript which executes on top of the original site with few security restrictions. It is easy to get started with GM scripts with minimal JavaScript knowledge. To get started on GM, check out this community documentation “GreasePot”. There is also a community to share the user scripts written by users all across the globe. Check it out here. http://userscripts.org

GreaseFire

Userscripts.org has thousands of scripts for different websites. So, before authoring a new script, check if the script exists already there. ‘GreaseFire’ is a tool to discover user scripts applicable for the current page. It is available as Firefox add-on and also as a Chrome extension. When ever you visit a site, GreaseFire will search the Userscripts.org directories and list down the users scripts which can be installed on that page. GreaseFire uses a ranking system to rank the scripts before listing them to you.

• Firefox. Firefox users can download the add-on from here. The add-on is around 3 MB in size. After installing the add-on, it will add a icon in the Firefox status bar. Clicking on it will list down the user scripts available for the current site.

• Chrome. Chrome users can download the Chrome extension from here. The extension is around 13 MB in size. After installing the extension, a new icon will appear on the address bar indicating if the site has any user scripts. Click on the icon to see the available user scripts. 

-- Varun

[GoogleLabs] Script Converter, Scribe and Breadcrumb

Google Labs is a playground where users can play with some of the cool experiments done at Google. Once the idea / product gets stabilized, they will be graduated from the labs. Some of the products graduated from the labs include Google Maps, Google Suggest, Google Reader, etc. Script Converter, Scribe and Breadcrumb are some of the tools recently launched in the labs. Try them out today.

Script Converter

Script Converter is an awesome tool which allows you to read a text / a complete web page in a script of your choice. This does not translate the text. This will be handy if a person can speak a particular language but can not read / write in that language. For example, I can understand spoken Telugu but can not read / write Telugu scripts. If I want to read a Telugu web page, this tool will help me to view the page in English scripts. The tool can also auto-detect the scripts used on a site. Open the twitter page of @agaraadhi. Check out the same page with English script here.

Scribe

Scribe is an auto-completion tool which was launched last month. It provides text completion suggestions based on the information already typed in the document. This also helps in saving the keystrokes. Scribe is available as a Chrome extension as well and can be used as a auto-completion on all the web pages.

 Breadcrumb 

Breadcrumb is a less known tool on Google Labs which enables you to create a variety of mobile learning applications and allows you to make your application work with only few annotations to the plain text. Annotations can be used to control the flow of text in the application. It provides an interface where in you can type the text and a mobile application will be created based on the annotated text. User guide / documentation is not available yet. Some of the use cases of this tool could be 1. Help data-center technicians troubleshoot problems on the datacenter floor. 2. Decision making system for the new employees of a team 3. Alternative for flow charts. () and [] are the annotations supported so far. click on the screenshot below to know more about the syntax.

-- Varun

Google’s Style Guide and JavaScript Lint tool

Last year, Google has open-sourced the JavaScript tool Closure. Google has been contributing actively to the Closure project and the latest addition to the project is a JavaScript Lint tool (A code checker that checks for common mistakes in scripts). The tool has been named as ‘Closure Linter’ and it works on the basis of Google’s JavaScript style guide.

Google’s Style guide

Google has published style guide for different languages part of the Google’s open source projects. The Style Guide project also include few tools to enforce that these guides are followed. Here are the available style guides and tools:

• C++ Style Guide
• JavaScript Style Guide
• Objective-C Style Guide
• Python Style Guide
• CPPLint, a C++ Lint tool
• google-c-style.el, an Emacs settings file for Google Style

Closure Linter

Closure Linter is available as a command line utility and can be downloaded from here. After installing the tool, just execute the tool “gjslint path/to/myfile.js”. This will check your code for any common errors. Your script will be checked for the style guide compliance. To fix the style problems reported using gjslint, use “fixjsstyle path/to/file1.js path/to/file2.js”

-- Varun