What do Live Search Maps, Yahoo! Mail, and Spiral Frog have in common?
They all annoy me in some very tiny tiny way.
Not to worry though; Greasemonkey to the rescue. If you're unfamiliar with it, Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug in that allows you to add user scripts to sites you visit.
Lately I've taken quite a liking to Greasemonkey as it has allowed me to "fix" three different web apps that I use on a regular basis.
Live Search Maps
Live Search Maps is Microsoft's answer to Google Maps, and regardless of your sentiments about Microsoft, it is a very good web app -- not perfect of course, but still quite good. A new version was just released which sports a shiny new interface which I really like a lot.
One thing that really annoyed me about the new UI though is that Firefox users are not given any way to access a permalink. I like to send permalinks to friends and family once I've situated the map with the view I want, and not having this ability is pretty frustrating.
Using Greasemonkey though, I was able to write a script that puts a "Show Permalink" button back in the UI. Anyone who is interested can simply install my LiveMaps_ViewPermalink Greasemonkey script.
Yahoo! Mail
My wife and I often share the same computer. We both use the same browser, we both use Yahoo! Mail. Whenever I sign her out (or she signs me out) it takes you to this stupid, annoying interim "You've been signed out" page with some stupid annoying ad. All I really want is to go directly back to the sign in page.
My Yahoo_SignOutFix Greasemonkey script fixes this!
Spiral Frog
Spiral Frog is a music download site where you can download (free of charge) DRM protected music from a lot of big name artists. It has a number of annoyances (what do you expect when you're getting free music), most of which I can put up with. But the one that I can't take is that fact that after you queue up, say, 10 songs for download, it won't automatically download all of them. Instead it makes you click "Next" after each song is complete in order to initiate the next download.
This really sucks because it means you have to sit there and wait (or else keep checking back) in order to download all the songs you want. Bah! Greasemonkey to the rescue.
My SpiralFrog_AutoDownload script makes it so that all of your queued up songs will keep downloading one right after another without your intervention!
Other Greasemonkey Scripts?
Got any favorite Greasemonkey scripts of your own? Tell me about them!
Happy Greasemonkeying!
8 Responses
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here's a quick excerptWhat do Live Search Maps, Yahoo! Mail, and Spiral Frog have in common? They all annoy me in some very tiny tiny way. Not to worry though; Greasemonkey to the rescue. If you're unfamiliar with it, Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug in that … […]
Firefox has a -noremote command line argument, which together with a profile switch allows you to run two separate web browser processes with two different profiles. So you and your wife wouldn't need to log in and out of mail applications. Of course, the same could be done with the operating system's fast user switching.
Thanks Rich! That's good information to know.
Still though, it's a little obnoxious that Yahoo! Mail sign out doesn't take me right back to the sign in page (Gmail gets this right), so I do still like my fix
Good to know I wasn't the only one annoyed about the missing permalink in Live Search Maps, but now with your script, it's not an issue.
I was just sitting down to write a Greasemonkey fix for the Spiral Frog Download Queue annoyance, but thought I should Blackle first to see if anyone else had invented that wheel. Found your script. You da man!
Thanks for the scripts, especially for Spiral Frog.
Question for you (or anyone reading this), does anyone get the annoying WMP plugin (what's needed for the SF download manager) pop-up in Firefox? I'm running Vista with Firefox 2.0.0.14 and have just installed the WMP 11 plugin that is supposedly supported on Vista but it's not working with SF. The plugin shows as being installed and working when I do about:plugins but Spiral Frog still tells me the plugin hasn't been installed and as such I can't use this service (or your script).
Mozilla even has a test page for the plugin (runs a short WM file) and it's working fine in Firefox.
Any thoughts? I really don't want to use IE (please nooooooooooooooo).
Cheers.
No, I'm not getting that pop-up in Firefox on SF. Never heard of that phenomenon, so unfortunately, I don't think I can be much help
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