Technology- CalendarData.com supports Live Clipboard
One of the features I’ve been messing with for a few weeks now is support for the Microsoft introduced Live Clipboard. Live Clipboard
brings copy and paste to the web, enabling you to copy and paste inside and between applications that support it. I’ve been messing
with this for awhile but I’ll admit that being quoted
mentioning it in an article in Wired Magazine was extra motivation to actually
get it online today.
To the best of my knowledge, CalendarData.com is the first production site to support Live Clipboard. Doing some searches I haven’t
found any other sites implementing it other than Ray Ozzie’s example pages. I noticed a grip over on mini observing that little progress has
been made since it was introduced back in April. This kind of whining is percisely why traditionally companies like
Microsoft hold these things back until they are all ready to go. The thought process goes “until our entire product line is ready to support
this and we have 100 developers lined up with us with press releases, let’s keep it under our hats”. That approach IS appropriate for
some things, but I’m a big fan of “get it out in the community and see where it goes from there” instead.
Today’s implementation is just a start- I’ve got lots of ideas about how to extend this further including adding some new clipboard
widgets to collect clippings, and some new formats to represent RSS feeds, calendars, and links to other objects (for example a link to a photo).
Another big issue we need to tackle is some UI evolution- to be honest, the little clipping icons scattered all over the page look somewhat
cluttered once you have a user interface with multiple elements. It might make sense to hide them somewhat until you move the mouse over their
associated object, etc.
Another observation from implementing this stuff- coding and debugging JavaScript in web pages pretty much sucks. Its much easier in Firefox
than IE since the Firefox JavaScript console, DOM Inspector and Web Developer toolbar are a great help. I assume there are similar things for IE
but I’m not aware of them, so shoot me an email if you have suggestions. Still, as I’m starting to use some JavaScript libraries for Live Clipboard
and the Prototype AJAX library, I often find myself chasing small syntax errors for unnaturally long time-spans.
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