SendToPhone now handles market links

Last week Patrick proposed a simple idea to workaround a limitation in the current ChromeToPhone app that doesn't allow to send anything but http links: if we use a proxy server, we can send a link to that server that when called from the phone returns the real link.

He did make some tests and worked so the next step was handling automatically market: links so that instead of Firefox asking what to do with such links, they are redirected to the phone, and thanks to the Torrent Server Handler extension we were able to learn the kind of code required to do the job. This is one of the beautiful things about open source, besides having the official docs that can be daunting for a newcomer, Patrick was able to look at that extension and we had our own market: handler.

Unfortunately it didn't seem to work with the changes in Firefox 4 about that kind of code, but I was able to re-arrange the code and created a new version that after some rewrites works in Firefox 3.x and 4.0b and also takes care of automatically enabling/disabling the handlers as soon as the corresponding preferences are toggled.

So we just had a little pending work: UI to change the protocols (check the last screenshots), some reported bugs and other minor improvements and finally we published version 1.0 yesterday. It might take some days until it's reviewed and approved, but if you are brave and want to have a big smile in your face, go to the version listing and install that 1.0

Of course, some people might be a little worried about the proxy server as it isn't using a secure connection, but as this is meant to be just a temporary workaround and we don't expect you to send military secrets with this kind of links I think that it should be OK. But in any case, you can change the url to any server that you like and you just have to put basic HTML page with just this code:

<script type="text/javascript">
 document.location = unescape( location.search.substr(5) );
</script>

and set the url in about:config for extensions.sendtophone.proxyUrl, for example with a local server you can use this url: http://192.168.0.29:8888/protocolHandler.html?url=
(the substr(5) in the javascript code is meant to remove the "?url=", so if you change that part remember to adjust the value).

If you enjoy this extension, it would be nice if you cold spend some little time to test the new version and report us if you have found any new problem so we can fix it ASAP. On the other hand if it's working fine, please write a nice review to offset the people that are still trying to install it in non-Froyo phones and write negative reviews.