This article, in its entirety, is from an email from my colleague, [Mike Siverd][mike]. A good overview of Aardvark, Greasemonkey, and Platypus which form the Firefox Axis of Alteration. I edited the email in a few spots to meet the highly refined rhetorical standards of this blog. Thanks Mike.
Recently, I’ve been playing with [Aardvark][aardvark], [Greasemonkey][greasemonkey], and [Platypus][platypus]. These are all Firefox extensions for the user to manipulate webpages.
Aardvark allows for transient modifications of your current page. You can mouse over the “objects” on the page, like tables,
’s, and
’s to delete them, isolate them, change their width functions, and more. This is useful for making bad pages printable and making really bad
pages legible. It’s also useful for killing that one really annoying ad, but
I’ve got a more specific extension for that.
Greasemonkey adds Javascript and DHTML to a page. It is also capable of
making HTTP and XML requests of its own and injecting those results
into the page. These scripts consistently add functionality to a page,
instead of the transient editing of Aardvark. There are scripts for
anything as simple as taking out the text adds in Google, or doing picture
lookups on LiveJournal, to tricky stuff, like adding an MBTA overlay to
Google Maps, and implementing a Javascript drag and drop interface to
your Netflix queue.
There are nerds that write these Greasemonkey
scripts. However, Platypus’s goal is to create a front end for simple
user webpage manipulation, and to save those actions as a Greasemonkey
script. Basically the rapid editing of Aardvark, and the consistent
application of Greasemonkey.
These extensions are a really fascinating way to quickly add power user features to
webpages and also to add functionality to pages that are unlikely to
ever implement these modifications.
[aardvark]:http://www.karmatics.com/aardvark/
[greasemonkey]:http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
[platypus]:http://platypus.mozdev.org/
[mike]:mailto:indy@geekessay.org
I think another component of the axis will be Google Desktop (or some other desktop search service). These services have a goal of basically indexing everything that happens on your computer and making it available for nearly instant searching. This includes files on the machine, emails, web pages browsed, chat sessions, etc. Google Desktop has provided an API to add on additional things to search.
Imagine the power of a browser session where statistically unusual text strings are grabbed from the site you are viewing and sent as searches to google desktop and then included in the page. When I’m looking at amazon and notice A Random Walk Down Wall Street, then on the page, i’ll automatically see a link to nivi.com/blog where nivi has posted a review of the book. And I’ll see an email that I got about a talk Malkiel is giving in a couple hours, etc.