[Greasemonkey] Cannot use GreaseMonkey :-(

[Tony Chang]

On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 10:35:15PM +0100, Andrew Hayward wrote:
> For anyone who's interested, I had a bit of a play around with the
> ideas that were thrown up...
> 
> http://sandbox.mooncalf.me.uk/javascript/greasemonkey/#gminstall

Cool, that's what I was thinking of.

As for the tooltip, I was envisioning something a bit more obvious, kind
of like what Jeffery Veen was playing around with w.r.t. RSS feeds:
  http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000733.html

Here's a modified version with a popup div:
  http://ponderer.org/tests/gminstall.user.js

I also ran into the same interaction problems that Veen is asking about.
I had a link in the popup that pointed to the "Using greasemonkey" page,
but if the div goes away on a mouseout event, then you can't hit the
link.  I tried it with a timer on mouseout, but it's unclear to me how
long it should stay visible.

BTW, if I'm breaking some implied license by modifying your user script,
just tell me and I'll take it down.

Tony


> It's a work in progress, but it seems to do the trick as far as is
> practically possible at this stage. AFAIK there is currently no way of
> telling Greasemonkey to install a script from within a script, nor is
> there a way of activating the GM Dialog Box. Both of which are fairly
> important concepts as far as this script is concerned!
> 
> Anyway, feel free to have a look-see.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> - Andrew
> 
> Simon Willison wrote:
> >On 4 Jun 2005, at 18:17, Tony Chang wrote:
> >
> >>On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 10:33:05AM +0100, Simon Willison wrote:
> >>
> >>>It strikes me that the usability involved with Greasemonkey are very
> >>>similar to the ones involved with RSS feeds - it's counter-intuitive
> >>>to have to be looking at a page full of meaningless code (meaningless
> >>>unless you know JavaScript) in order to install it.
> >>
> >>
> >>I agree that this is a problem as multiple people have asked about  this
> >>on the mailing list.
> >>
> >>However, I think that user scripts are a bit different than RSS  feeds in
> >>that viewing them before installing them has a purpose (if you know
> >>javascript).
> >>
> >>I wonder if it's possible to get the warning toolbar (the thingy that
> >>displays when popup windows are blocked or a plugin isn't  installed) to
> >>pop up when you're viewing a .user.js file?  Having some text and a
> >>button for installing the user script there sounds more intuitive than
> >>navigating to the tools menu.
> >
> >
> >That's a great idea! A nice big panel with "This is a Greasemonkey  user
> >script. Click here to install it" would be much, much more  obvious than
> >the current greyed-out menu option. Modelling it after  the "this site
> >tried to install an extension but wasn't allowed to"  panel is a good
> >idea up to a point, but it needs a nice big monkey  face to make it
> >obvious that it's related to Greasemonkey. Users  don't read stuff.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >
> >Simon
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-- 
Tony Chang
http://ponderer.org