gears-mozilla-extension

Don't just surf the web - command it!Gears is a time-saving extension for mozilla firefox web browser which provides an everywhere web browsing experience by letting you give commands to firefox to speed up common web activities like searching, translating, mapping, e-mailing etc.

To make it easy for user to run commands, Gears provide pseudo-natural-language method: You type what you want to do, Gears guesses what you mean and suggests you best matches of commands. For instance, you want to search about "internet" on "Google", hit a hotkey to bring up Gears interface and type "google internet" then hit enter; this will show the search results for "intenet" from google search engine on Gears interface.

Gears command framework provides you a pool of in-built commands which let you perform searches on obvious search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. and also performs searching on popular websites like flickr, youtube, wikipedia etc. and show their search results on a seperate preview pane.

It will also provide its API in near future so that you can write your own commands using HTML and javascript.

Gears offers many advantages:

It perform searches on separate panel, hence it does not make your working space i.e, the browser area clumsy. It saves you opening new windows and tabs to perform searching. It saves your browsing time by providing a single panel to search everywhere. No need to visit to search engine's default website. It perform common web activities like searching mapping etc for you.

10 min Introduction to GearsGears is a search panel which becomes a part of Mozilla Firefox when installed. Any user who is using firefox can access this search-pad and search anything on any search engine thorugh one location.

1. Pre-requisitesMozilla firefox v3.0 or later. An Internet Connection. 2. InstallationIn order to install Gears, download the latest version from the download section on right hand side. The download size is 500KB - 1MB, and downloading time depends upon your internet connection. A .xpi file with the version number as filename will be downloaded.

After downloading Gears, run Firefox from All Programs> Firefox or from run command. When firefox window is opened, drag the downloaded .xpi file(Installer) on the firefox window. This opens up add-on manager for firefox and prompts you to install the extension. Then click "install". This will install Gears in your firefox.

When installation completes, add-on manager asks you to restart firefox. Restart the firefox. Now you are ready to use it.

3. User InterfaceGears user interface consists of a single panel called "searchpad" which can be accessed using keyboard Shift+Space hotkey combination or by clicking on Gears icon at the extreme right on the status bar. The key combination can be used to toggle Gears window on or off. The simple interface design consists of a searchbox(to write commands) and a preview panel(to display results).

As you start typing inside searchpad Gears suggests you related commands that Gears can perform for you. Select the command and specify what you want to do with the command as a natural language text.

for instance, you want to search articles on wikipedia for computer science, then write on searchpad, wikipedia ,i.e,

wikipedia computer science
and hit enter. This will show list of wikipedia articles found for "computer science" on searchpad itself.

4. Gears CommandsGears command Framework known as "jgears" provides you some built-in commands to let you command the web:

Web Search commands

bing, google, google-image, google-book, yahoo, wikipedia, weather, define, flickr, youtube, translate, news

Tags

  launchpad everyware jgears gears-mozilla-extension

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