The Computer Machine Whisperer

Although I’ve already entered CopyURL and Affiliator in the Extend Firefox 3 competition, I wanted to see what I could do with 3 days of intense coding. My wife always complains about writing long posts on YouTube, then losing them due to a session timeout. I’m always looking for a problem to fix, and this seemed like a perfect idea for the competition, so starting this past Monday, I created TextSaver.

When you load the addon and restart Firefox, you should see a little disk-and-paper icon in the statusbar. We’ll get to that in a minute. To start, go ahead and type something in a text input, whether it be a standard textbox, a textarea, or whatever magic Google uses in GMail (which do not appear to be standard textboxes according to Firebug). Click “Add this text to TextSaver”, and you should see a sidebar appear, along with a box prompting you for a name. Pick whatever name you’d like to remember this snippet of text by, and click “OK”. The text is now safely stored in the sidebar, ready to be dragged and dropped on any text input, even those outside of Firefox.

You can also drag and drop pretty much anything that has a text representation onto the sidebar, and the process will remain the same. Clicking the globe icon next to the item’s name will open a tab containing the page you were on when you saved the text. Clicking “(edit)” will pop up an edit dialog allowing you to modify the name, URL, or content of the saved text. Finally, clicking the close button in an item will allow you to delete it permanently.

You may have also noticed the search box above the saved text items. As you type in this box, it will rapidly search through the names, URLs, and contents of every piece of text you’ve saved with TextSaver, filtering out those that don’t match. This is a quick way, for example, of finding that post on YouTube out of the hundreds that have timed out. Hopefully you’ll have deleted some after you’re done using them, but if you’ve got the desire to keep them around, feel free to do so.

Clicking on the TextSaver icon in the status bar will pop up a menu giving you the option to show/hide the sidebar, as well as whether or not to show the context menu item for TextSaver. If you prefer dragging/dropping, and don’t want to lose valuable context menu real estate, get rid of it, and it’ll never bother you again.

Thanks for trying TextSaver. I welcome all feedback, critiques, and complaints. If you’ve found it helpful, donations are also gladly accepted, and greatly appreciated.