2010/06/04

Send To Phone is now approved

Today the Send To Phone extension has been approved so installing it should be a little easier and less "frightening", but most important, now it's part of the auto-update so everyone should get the latest version soon.

Well, maybe not everybody because looking at the stats it says that one user has tried to install it in Thunderbird, and someone else is running Firefox 2.0, so I guess that he might have disabled automatic updates (but then why does he wants an extension that requires you to be on the bleeding edge using a pre-release OS in your phone?)

Since the initial release the extension has got some little adjustments:

  • First the localizations, now they are partly done so if you have an update for your language send it to us.
  • Then the context menu was improved to allow better control over sending links or images.
  • After that a little adjustment to try to send the current view while navigating the maps instead of just the Google Maps url
  • And the last one before approval was a context menu on the toolbar to allow to logout (it just clears the cookie), so you can switch accounts.

Lots of people are downloading the extension and they are happy about it. It's not a revolution about how to use your mobile, but I've found it useful to quickly send to the phone a url or video that I wanted to watch as I move away from the computer.

The next things that might get added is support for more apps (Seamonkey, Thunderbird) and a more controlled login experience (use our own dialog instead of showing the default login in a new tab). Drop here a note if you have a nice idea, but remember that this is only the part for your browser, the Android App is the one provided by Chrome to Phone project.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, can´t log in @ Send to Phone on Firefox.
Can you repair this?
Greetz
dergago

Alfonso said...

Are you using a gmail account or are you trying to use a "Google Apps for your domain"?

Does the Chrome extension work?

Have you tried to install in a new profile in Firefox? (sometimes I've seen that Google gets confused about login and trying to post in Google groups gets in a loop trying to do a login)

David said...

Hey...found a couple minor bugs...

one was with the 'send to selection'

here's a diff:

--- overlay.js 2010-07-31 10:50:50.605903295 -0400
+++ overlay.mine.js 2010-07-31 10:50:45.605894903 -0400
@@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
break;
case 'text':
title = "Selection";
- url = 'http://www.google.com/';
selection = content.getSelection().toString();
+ url = 'http://www.google.com/search?q=' + selection;
break;
case 'page':
default:

I suppose it would be a good to do some space handling as well:

selection = selection.replace(/\s+/, '+');

Don't know if the text area size will let that be rendered correctly :-(

Also the apk url appears to be incorrect.

Great addon though. Thanks

Alfonso said...

Thanks for the comment.

The url isn't shown in the phone when some selection is sent, so it uses just a simple url.

There might be times when processing the spaces so there's only one can be useful, but as a general rule I think that the extension shouldn't try to be too smart and it should just send whatever it's selected.

Lastly, yes, we know that the link to the apk now doesn't work. Hopefully in the next release we will include a URL that will remain working with future updates.