1. Integration of Athens protected databases... for instance LexisNexis and EBSCO... this would be immense! I have several colleagues who would switch to the mac platform (and your software) just for this feature! I'm not suggesting you create plugins for every Athens database, but have an easy way of inputting the login credentials as part of the settings for a plugin or similar.
2. Ability to define further search criteria (for instance restricting results to a particular range of published dates for news websites etc).
3. When navigating to a PDF page, to have the ability to send this original PDF file to DEVONthink... currently it only sends a link, or a badly cropped PDF image of the original. (Note: the PDF of normal HTML coded webpages works fantastically!)
4. Have support for 3rd party plugins with a place on your website where people can download plugins made by other users (I've just done one for CNN and wouldn't mind sharing it and get feedback etc). Or is this something that the community should initiate and set up as an external portal or similar?
5. Ability to influence more of the plugin settings within the search sets itself (currently only able to change the number of results returned I think).
6. Add a bookmarks bar to the browser window similar to that of Safari.... then I can finally retire Safari and just use DEVONagent... On this point I must ask - how have you managed to make it so much faster when it uses the same rendering engine?! I'm impressed!
thank you for the feedback. #1 is unlikely as plugins are faceless (without login) at the moment, #3 will be possible in DA 2.0, #4 depends actually on how many people are willing to create plugins but V2 will introduce many more plugins anyway.
And #6 - I don’t know. Maybe Safari isn’t using the default WebKit delay before rendering a page. But the most likely reason is the metal look - that’s a real slowdown.
Solving the ‘faceless plugins’ problem would be a huge win for agent. Looking at how plugins are
implemented [XML descriptions, no scriptability] , though, I don’t see any easy way to do it. The
info can be gathered easily enough [firefox has plugins like urlparams and ‘view cookies’], and
XML tags for authentication method [basic, digest, form] could be used … but I wouldn’t want
to write it
Could sharing plugins be done here on the forum, since they are XML? Looks like the board
doesn’t support attachments, dunno if the CODE tag would keep the XML from getting
mangled.
Now for my own humble request … the ability to enable/disable javascript/etc from the browser
toolbar. This is probably already planned for when the customizable toolbar gets added. More
browser are security features, e.g. TDN/IDN warnings or reverse DNS to show IP, would be nice
but are probably overkill. I just miss them when using agent [or DT] as my default browser.
If these databases allow the use of cookies as login credentials than you would be able to use these. I just checked lexis.com and it seems to be possible, but since I don’t have a login I can’t try it out.
You’d just login with your an DEVONagent browser (or any other WebKit based browser such as Safari) and then set the cookie for the login. After that you can use DEVONagent.
You know, I never even considered trying that It makes perfect sense, agent being a browser with cookie support, and any site using PHP sessions probably uses cookies.
Well, I created a [very primitive] plugin for the ACM digital library, logged in to ACM and tried the plugin – sho nuff, it works!
Thanks for the pointer, this is incredibly useful.
BTW, what is the problem with ‘faceless plugins’ that cannot be solved either by logging in before using the plugin [cookies] or by encoding login credentials in the query URL [CGI GET/POST vars]?
Go to the “Tools->Edit Search Sites…” menu, then click the “Sites” tab in the window that opened. Here you see the opportunity to login for a certain webpage. Is this something that you were looking for?
Off the top of my head I don’t know if a Site is visited before a Plugin, but you could potentially create a new Search Set, add the site and login information here, then enable your plugin in the “Plugins” tab and see where it gets you. If the Sites entry is visited before the plugin is executed, you should be able to get the information off it. Ok, I just ran a little test and it doesn’t work, the Sites are used at the last stage. I’ll have to ask Christian about it.
No, actually the cookie trick solved my problem. I’d heard the ‘faceless plugin’ answer used to explain why, for example, ACM could
not be searched with a plugin. It looks like it can be searched, though it is a bit of added work [much better than not working
at all!]. Unless I am missing something, it seems like all sites requiring authentication can be searched without too much trouble.
So I thought I was missing something
Regarding sites, having a checkbox to ‘run before plugins’ would certainly automate the process and make it possible to schedule
these searches.
Hi Everybody!
I don´t know if this post is pertinent.
Please, I need to add plugins for WorlCat, EBSCO, Espacenet, ScienceDirect, Science Gov, as many others.
Thanks very much,
Ricardo
It makes perfect sense, agent being a browser with cookie support, and any site using PHP sessions probably uses cookies.