It had to happen ... so it did. A bunch of Usability researchers have put together a simple little Firefox addon called Chickenfoot that helps you program your web browser to complete simple tasks. Just in case you are going whaaaa? Here is a small example of what you can do in Chickenfoot and you will get the idea.
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go("google.com")
enter("Rajesh Vasa")
click("google search")
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They provide a few more functions to help perform common tasks, and the language they created is an extension of Javascript.
Opera has recently announced on their blog, that they too have started to add similar functionality and should seep slowly into their stable releases. Firefox will most likely not make this a core functionality, since this is not really something most end-users will care for.
Now why is this great? What is the pain point that they are attempting to address?
To start with, this is real cool -- but will developers bother learning it and using it beyond 15-20 min? One area that I think it can help a lot is in making a certain category of testing scripts -- and there is no reason why this cannot be used in a rudimentary way for Test driven development for web applications. The other area that it can be used is for developing Firefox extensions (it has a button in the Development interface to deploy the code as an extension). The language and interface are simple enough to be used as an educational language to teach someone getting into programming (or) is keen to learn a bit more about programming.
It is always good to see incremental developments that have a potential to have an impact.
3 comments:
Any idea whether or not it works with flash content?
It does not seem to work with Flash content (yet). I assume that Adobe will take up something similar to this sooner or later.
The whole approach just seems to make it so much easier to write up simple scripts.
Hello.
Do you use *nix? If you do, this concept is not new and it has being executed.
In term of Flash, no, I dont think they care for such a feature. Flash itself is evil anyway; the internet is much more better without it.
Cheers.
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