Increasingly, I’m doing more of my (non-work) web browsing on my PDA.
And as a big fan of using del.icio.us to store and share interesting sites that I come across, I’ve missed the tools you can get for desktop browsers (like Internet Explorer or Firefox) that let you throw your current page at your del.icio.us list.
If you’ve not used them before, the idea is to have a popup window that gets prefilled with the URL and name of the page you are looking at in your browser, lets you add a few tags, then submit it to del.icio.us when you hit ‘Save’.
So I thought I’d have a go at creating something similar for Pocket Internet Explorer – the browser you get with Windows Mobile.
To cut a long story short, I’ve put something together and it seems to work. If you have a Windows Mobile PDA and fancy giving it a try, feel free to give it a go.
To go into a little more detail… it was more of a pain than I expected. 🙂
Internet Explorer really isn’t the most friendly beast to the plugin writer! Basically, I needed to write a DLL in C++ that hooked into one of the menu extensions in Pocket Internet Explorer.
This is not as trivial as I expected – it took hundreds and hundreds of lines of code just to get a new entry in the Internet Explorer’s menu that gets me access to the web browser object as an IWebBrowser2. And (perhaps especially so for someone who has been getting a little lazy with Java and C#! 😉 ), some of it is a little intricate and complex.
Still, once done I could use my access to the browser to launch my “post to del.icio.us” form and prefill it with the URL and page name of PIE’s current page. From there, the form uses the public del.icio.us API to send all the info off to my del.icio.us list.
I should say a few thanks… I was helped out in my hacking from a few places:
- A Microsoft presentation on developing for Pocket Internet Explorer as a platform – with a list of the extension points you can get into with a DLL
- A code sample from Microsoft on context menu extensions – it’s a nice start that helped me get up to speed on writing code to hook into them
- A pointer I got from an MSDN forum on building projects with IWebBrowser2 in Visual Studio
- The .NET del.icio.us API code I found on SourceForge – modified a bit to be able to run on the .NET Compact Framework you get on Windows Mobile, but still saved me some time in having to prepare the web request and reading the response
- The official del.icio.us API documentation
Update 19/07/2007: The zip file is now packaged as a CAB file which you can run on your PDA. This handles the registering of the DLL for you. (I really should have done it this way to start with… sorry!)
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[…] Jason Langridge has a post about a del.icio.us plugin for Windows Mobile. The creator has more information here at his blog. […]
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[…] Very cool! You can read more HERE […]
[…] Very cool! You can read more HERE […]
Update: I’ve improved the error handling a bit. I’ve also modified the del.icio.us form so that it is minimised while posting – why bother waiting for it to finish uploading your new bookmark to the server when it can do it in the background? (It will pop up again if it has any problems).
Thanks to everyone who has given it a try!
[…] If you use Del.icio.us then this plugin could be useful […]
[…]This is super cool – it’s a plugin for PocketIE that posts a bookmark to your del.icio.us […]
[…] now you will be able to submit there pages directly from Windows Mobile too […]
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[…] the public del.icio.us API to send all the info off to my del.icio.us list. Read and download here Tags:beast del icio us dll in c explorer internet iwebbrowser2 menu extensions pocket internet […]
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What am I missing? I’ve tried to install the plugin, copying the .exe and .dll to my windows folder on my PPC. I did a soft-reset and the menu doesn’t show up in IE for me. I can run the exe manually. Do I need to register the DLL somehow?
Hiya
Sorry! You’re quite right, I should’ve included instructions on how to register the DLL. That’s what happens when you write posts at 2am!
Gimme 5 mins and I’ll create a CAB project that does it all properly.
Kind regards
Dale
Done – if you download the zip file again, you should find it contains a CAB file which does the setup needed.
Sorry again!
Dale
the CAB file works great, thanks!
[…] one kind soul has taken pity on Windows Mobile users and developed a del.icio.us plugin for Pocket Net […]
[…] Dalelane.co.uk has released a free plug-in for Pocket IE/ Internet Explorer Mobile for Windows Mobile Pocket PC devices. This plug-in adds a menu item to the browser, which when clicked on, pops up a new page prefilled with the URL of the webpage you were viewing and the title. You can optionally enter tags and notes for the selected website and choose to publish & save the link to your del.icio.us account using their API. While there are many online mobile services allow you to access bookmarks from any social site, none of them integrate so closely with the mobile browser to save webpages directly to an online bookmarking site. Hopefully the author with integrate more social bookmarking websites into the plug-in as the major coding work has been accomplished. […]
Looks great! Plan on making one similar for Opera Mobile (not Mini)? It’s my browser of choice on WM, or do you know of anything similar? Thanks, and keep up the great work!
[…] You can read more HERE […]
Looks cool but can we see the source of the native part so we know how it can be done?
[…] A del.icio.us plugin for Windows Mobile (or C++ is a pain) (tags: del.icio.us wm5 plugin) […]
@Patrick – Interesting idea – I use Opera on my PDA, too.
I’ve not looked into writing an Opera plugin… I’ll try and take a look at some point and see if they have an API for new menu items.
@zebrum – Sure, I’ll tidy it up a bit, add a few comments then find somewhere to make it available. Gimme a day or two to get round to it, though 🙂
@zebrum – Check out the page I’ve added for the del.icio.us plugin on my homepage – http://dalelane.co.uk/software – where I’ve added a zipped-up copy of my Visual Studio solution.
At some point, I will get round to adding support for other services (like digg?), and modify it for a Smartphone version. But if anyone wants to go ahead and beat me to it starting from what I’ve got so far, please feel free. 🙂
[…] Désormais, il est possible de soumettre des liens ? del.icio.us depuis son téléphone mobile Windows Mobile en installant le plugin accessible ? l’adresse suivante ? votre navigateur Pocket Internet Explorer : https://dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=175 […]
Do you know if this is compatible with PIEPlus? I tried installing your del.icio.us plugin but it doesn’t show up in the Tools menu.
I don’t know – I’ve never used PIEPlus. Can I ask – how did you try installing it? With the CAB? Or manually?
[…] Now you can get’em together. Intrepid soul Dale Lane over at Learn Something New took the challenge to build a plugin DLL for the mobile ie browser that lets you seamlessly call del.icio.us to mark various visited sites. […]
Hi–
Regarding PIEPlus, it does not seem to be working. I installed it via the CAB on two devices with PIEPlus and it does not seem to be working. If you need any info to debug this, please let me know. Thanks.
eyt*
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@Eric – This will probably have to wait until I get back in a couple of weeks, sorry.
If you can’t wait, and are a code monkey like me, I have made the source available on http://dalelane.co.uk/software/ so please feel free to take a look.
D
Share your bookmarks with Windows Mobile…
Over the last few months I’ve become a real fan of del.icio.us for storing and sharing bookmarks. So far I’ve collected something in region of 600 (take a look at my del.icio.us bookmark list here). The other thing I’m starting…
[…] información aquà Comparte este post: Meneame! | Floreame! | email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! […]
[…] Plugin de del.icio.us para Windows Mobile Para todos aquellos usuarios de del.icio.us , existe una versión para Windows Mobile, desarrollada por un usuario que se llama Delane. […]
[…] more of a pain than I expected…” To get the plugin and read the rest of the post visit Learning Something New. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web […]
Please make a plugin like this for Opera Mobile as well. PIE is.. well.. not very good. And the new Opera Mobile 8.65 should be every smart users preferred browser. Especially smartphone users. 🙂
[…] and requires Windows Mobile 5.0 or newer, and the .NET Compact Framework 2.0. Read more about it here. Mobile […]
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[…] was surprised by the reaction to my del.icio.us plugin for Pocket Internet Explorer – between my blog post and the download page, I got something like 70 links and over 1,000 downloads in a couple of weeks. […]
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Hi Dale,
Thank you for trying to develop this! I’ve only been using del.icio.us for a couple of months, but I have gotten a lot of utility out of it so far, and this just helps add to it.
One problem I had was that if I try to post a url that already exists in my del.cio.us links, it just comes back with an error that it couldn’t post it. Rather it should just tell you that you’ve already created a link to it and optimally even ask you if you want to edit that link.
Also, and I know this is probably another big project and one that might even be more work for you than this one, I would love to see a plugin that would let me search through my delicious links and navigate to them in the same way that I can with the IE and FF plugin. That would be ideal because then I wouldn’t have to deal with PIE bookmarks anymore, I could use del.icio.us for everything. Well, I guess I can already by just going to the site, but it would be much easier to deal with a plugin than having to navigate through delicious to find the links I needed…
I’m actually just starting to learn to develop windows apps with .Net, so maybe I’ll take a crack at this in the not too distant future with your generously offered source code!
@Levi
Thanks for the kind comments. Adding support for editing (as well as adding) bookmarks is a good idea – I’ll have a go at adding this at some point (although this will probably not be anytime soon).
As for a mobile way to view bookmarks, I use mobilicious for that, so haven’t had the need to write an app like that.
Kind regards
D
Thanks Dale, I didn’t know about Mobilicious. It looks good, although I’d still love to have something with better ui features than what you can do with a web page…
Levi
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[…] A del.icio.us plugin for Windows Mobile (or C++ is a pain) Pocket IE del.icio.us plugin and source […]
This will surely bridge the gap between the PCs and PDA world. Does this work across all platforms ?
Ron
Afraid not. The nature of trying to extend the Pocket Internet Explorer menus makes this code quite platform-specific. I really wrote it for myself – so it will work on PDA’s like my own (that is to say, touchscreen devices running Windows Mobile 5 or 6).
The code is shared, so if anyone wanted to port it to a different browser or platform, that might help get them started.