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I need an Maxthon alpha tester or two…

I need an Maxthon alpha tester or two…

By March 28, 2006 Random thoughts 2 Comments

I need a Maxthon user (and if you are not one you should be – it is an alterenative browser based around IE) to test a new browser plug in.

The newest version of the Google tool bar does not work in Maxthon. I use search Site ALL the times and search images ALMOST as much. Without those two items in Maxthon, it is missing some major features.

So, I’ve written a toll bar that will take the text in the search field and use it to do those extra searches that the Google Tool bar does. It even EXTENDS the google functionality because it will search the news page for info you type in there.

So, this is it at a barely functional level. Please try it and tell me if you come up with any flaws major or minor. I already have in the about box a list of 8 or 9 things I want to do before it reaches a beta level. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks…

Here is the Zip: http://www.thecodecave.com/downloads/GoggleAlpha1.zip
Just extract it with paths to the Maxthon directory, the built in paths will put it where it belongs. Then just open a webpage in Maxthon and the tool bar will appear. (you have to be at a page for the tool bar to appear, if you’ve chosen not to have any page open on startup, the toolbar will appear when you open a page.

Here’s my recommended Gogglebar positioning:
Alpha 1

ADDENDUM:

So if you have a web page open and look for Goggle in the toolbar menu it is not there? Well, for the same reason it requires a page to be open, it likewise requires the Goggle DLL to be registered. You should be able to do clicking Start>Run and pasting in a modified version of this:
regsvr32 “c:\program files\Maxthon\Plugin\Goggle\Goggle.dll”
That will of course have to point to the right director for Maxthon…

See unfortunately this is an IE plugin that works in Maxthon. Ideally, the IE dependency will be removed but i’m not sure how to do that ATM. That may not be fixible befor a beta release, but it is not a big deal if it comes with an installer…

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Capt. Queeg

2 Comments

  1. Moamen Ahmed

    Hello SilverPaladin,
    I would love to help you in testing this new plugin, I think it would be a superb plugin when it is released, I would send my comments about the plugin by PM at maxthon forum.
    Also I will send this plugin to the member “RakuPl” at the forum by e-mail, so he can test it too if you don’t mind.
    Best regards,
    Moamen

  2. Laurent

    Works here after registrating dll. But despite this works I don’t think I will ever use it because 1) it requires registration and I use Maxthon unregistrated from USB key on different computers 2) my homepage is Google, and all functions are already offered by Google web page apart the very useful local site search 3) little gain in functionnality for almost a meg-sized dll. This not means the plugin is not good but only that *I* won’t use it. Good work nevertheless.

  3. Brian

    Laurent:

    Good morning, or afternoon for you now I guess…. You raise very good points. I too am very dissappointed that this is not portable. I know a heck of a lot more about shell programming than I did a week ago. And so hopefully, to day when I take another look at the C implementation of the Maxthon code I’ll be able to actually attempt to port the app over. This current plugin was initially based upon an example posted to the Maxthon forum. I spend a couple days commenting all the units so that I could understand what was going on. There are actually more comments than code in several of the units – as should be in all revealed source examples. I’ve already found that several of the units that took the most effort to understand, are not needed if you use standard built in Delphi components in the right fashion. So, unfortunately, that means that I’ll be dropping several of those units.

    The Site search was the number one function I needed. It was why I wrote the plugin. So, for me, that make it worth loading. The other thing is that the Maxthon search takes me to amazon and other places I don’t want to go. If I want an image, I don’t what to have to do a multi step process – whether that means going back to the Google home page or changing the check boxes in the search drop down. I prefer typing in the name and going in one click (or hopefully soon one hot key press). But I know well enough that EVERYONE uses each computer differently. So this plugin is not for everyone and that’s not a problem at all. The truth of the matter is, the plugin is for ME and the source code is for the community. 🙂

    Moamen:

    Welcome! Thanks checking in! Yes, feel free to pass this on to whoever you think will be able to test it well or use it as is. Let me know what you think and if you’ll want me to use a different graphic in the about box. PLUS if you get inspired and can find some nice 30×20 icons for the buttons, I probably wouldn’t reject those either. 🙂

    Any tester all should be aware that since this is an Alpha 1 release, the underlying code will still change dramatically and there will be further updates. That means that while the feature set will likely remain the same (with perhaps some new things added) Everything else – everything behind the scenes – will change. It’s kind of amazing that hours and days can be spent in a project to get it to do exactly the same thing as it did before. But there’s no reason why this app should be >100K imho. Half of the reason it is huge (878K) right now is the fact that it is dragging along a large chunk of MS Active X stuff. Turning it into a TRUE Maxthon control should take care of it. The other reason is that I am using two BMPs in the About box. Working with BMPs was simpler in the first go around – meaning I didn’t have to dig into my directories to find the jpg sample code I already had written. Those two bmps total 342K. When I put in the JPEG code, they’ll be 23K. So, that’s already a HUGE savings.

    I MIGHT be able to do the same thing with the images on the buttons. Right now at 24bit color they are 3.5K (x 5=17.5K) at 256 color they’d be a total of 11K as Jpegs they would total 5.5k. So that’s another 12K savings. I don’t know if that’s worth even bothering with. But it is one more way to make the app leaner and might be worth considering if I add more buttons.

    I saw an example of a really cool Google search builder that I think I will be adding in under an advanced button. The person said to do what we want with the plug in. So I think I’ll gut it and port it into Delphi giving due credit in the about box of course…

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