v1.2 is out!
Pagehop — the Launcher app for the Web — check the website.
Another minor release, bringing such features… the first digit should be incrementing, instead. ☺
Before going into detail, here are the highlights of this release:
- Page Preview (load item’s address in a Web View);
- Result Preview generated by recipes and tools (HTML);
- Recipes are now able to alter the hops array (breadcrumb);
- New visual design and bigger frame;
5 new recipes:
- DocSearch;
- CodeSearch;
- WolframAlpha;
- Weather;
- Time.
We made several important improvements, too:
- No dependencies installed anymore ;
- 4MB smaller binary;
- … and many more smaller improves and bug-fixes.
Check the full release notes here.
Other than Pagehop itself, we took the time to completely redesign pagehopapp.com to better suit the needs of our users and be easier to navigate-through and learn-from.
Lets waste no more time and show you a piece of that awesomeness, we call Pagehop 1.2.
Page Preview and the new Visual Design
Textual results are great. Still, while you read through them, there is no harm in loading a preview of the page which might hold what you are searching for.
This might help you find the right source, and it might save you time if you can simply read what you need from the preview and don’t wait for page-load time in the browser.
In fact, we’ve tried to make Pagehop’s Preview more suitable for doing the reading right there, in the app. The frame is bigger, the WebView gets slightly more than half of the window and we’ve disguised it as a mobile browser, so every website shows something suitable for smaller screen.
Of course if you have a several-minutes worth of text and high-res imagery, just press the Return key and load it up in your browser.
Result Preview generated by recipes and tools
v1.2 of Pagehop’s API for recipes and tools allows you to include an html preview as a property on of every result (for both recipes and tools).
For example, the DefineWord recipe now takes advantage of this capability.
Check the new structure of results for recipes and for tools.
Recipes are now able to alter the hops
In version 1.0, recipes were executed only after specifying a big enough portion of their id and then pressing Space. This way, before adding the trailing space, the user was notified which recipe is he/she going to execute.
But in 1.1 we changed this, according to the feedback and wide-spread confusion regarding this behavior and now recipes are always directly executed (no need for trailing space).
This creates a new problem — how do you know what executed? Results are usually looking different, but this wasn’t good enough.
This is why we decided that we need some kind of status bar to show up what recipe has executed. And naturaly we thought — but we have that already — The Breadcrumb! Or the hops array (depending on your perspective as user or developer of recipes and tools).
We’ve improved the page-loop API to receive the hops array and to be able to alter it (usually just add the first item) and we took the time to implement this feature in all of Pagehop’s recipes.
So if I use GoogleSearch (if none is specified, it’s the default recipe used) I would see, GoogleSearch as a first item in the… menu? Nope — the breadcrumb.
It turned out that it’s a nice place to put a notification to the user, if the recipe can’t be executed, too.
CodeSearch and DocSearch recipes
We’ve had our eye on the searchcode.com project for a long time, but we didn’t wanted to implement anything before we had the proper tools to visualize results.
So right after we finished (or should I say “we had something… committed in the master branch” for) the Result Preview, we took the time and made it happen.
searchcode.com provides 2 different APIs:
- Search for real-world programming code examples from about 5 000 000 repos on Github, Bitbucket, Google Code, Codeplex, Sourceforge and others;
- Search for technical documentation on multiple programming languages, libraries and technologies such as Python, PHP, Clojure, Git, SVN, Mercurial, Win32 Errors, SQL Server, VB6, etc.
With the CodeSearch recipe you can find real-world examples of projects using specific functions or methods you are wondering yourself how to use.
Here is an example of checking for usages of NodeJS’ fs.readFileSync:
Here are a few examples of using DocSearch:
and
WolframAlpha recipe
Wolfram Alpha is a truly impressive knowledge engine. It obviously makes use of some sophisticated algorithms for natural language processing, since it’s capable of understanding all of these queries:
wolf plot x^2
wolf second derivative of x^2
wolf what is the population of UK
wolf what is the distance between new york and san francisco
wolf distance between new york and san francisco
wolf what year is it
wolf which is the biggest state in the U
Here are a few examples:
and
and my personal favorite…
Weather and Time recipes
Both of these recipes require only a location in their query.
Time shows you the local time and offset from UTC.
And Weather shows you the current weather at a location, as well as a 3-day prognosis.
With some improvements these 2 recipes are ported from the Flashlight project. We’ve made a better (full) mapping between weather conditions and thumbnails.
Massive improvements and Fixes
Besides all the cool new features and recipes, we’ve an impressive progress on the system side, too. Keep in mind this release is only 45 days after the last one.
First of all, our binary is now at 24MB (including all recipes and tools), which is 4MB less than 1.1. And considering how much content we’ve added in 1.2 — it’s definitely something to be proud of.
Secondly, Pagehop doesn’t install anything additional, anymore. It uses NodeJS internally (it’s embedded) and doesn’t install or update it system-wide.
There are also some other, but minor improvements we’ve done here and there and some bugs we’ve fixed, but since the post already is at the stage of TL;DR. we won’t bother you with those.
Finally
We think Pagehop’s development is moving in the right direction and we’re very excited for the future and what it has to bring.
We hope you’ll enjoy our cute/nice/great/let’s just say it and be done with it — Awesome App! ☺
And we count on your support and honesty, so we can continue to work as hard on this project.
Enjoy Pagehop 1.2!
Cheers,
The Pagehop Team
