Chrome Dev and Canary (18+) now support Web Intents! Currently, intent registration is done via the Chrome apps manifest (not the intent tag) to allow the user agent to determine available services (including those on the local network or external native apps). The manifest entry specifies the supported action, data types, title, and path. Client-side code remains the same. Future support for declaring capabilities directly through HTML with the Intent tag is planned.
Hey everyone, I've been playing with the dev channel of Chrome and discovered something huge: background pages for web apps! This means your web app can now run even when the browser is closed, or even after system start-up. It's crazy powerful. You enable this by adding the "background" permission to your app manifest and then using a simple window.open() call with a special third parameter. The background page's state can be toggled with window.close(). Communication between the background page and your app is done using SharedWorkers. Oh, and Appmator now supports this too!
In this post, I address the question of how to detect Chrome Extension updates. While there isn't a single API call for this, we can achieve it using the Management API's onInstalled event, which fires upon both installation and updates. By maintaining a record of installed extensions and their versions, we can compare the version in the onInstalled callback with our existing record, identify updates, and notify the user when an update occurs.
I'm searching for plugins created using JetBrains OpenAPI for ReSharper 2.0+, but they're proving difficult to find. The only one I've encountered is mentioned in a blog post, and it doesn't seem to have been officially released. I have some plugin ideas of my own, but the available documentation and examples aren't very helpful.
I'm trying out Windows Live Writer and so far, I'm impressed! It renders my blog's styling correctly while I'm writing, seems pretty fast, and has a bunch of built-in features similar to other blogging tools. Plus, it's extendable via an SDK, which I'm excited to explore. I'm also going to check out the plugins and share more thoughts soon.
