The Munson's Apps

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Chrome extension favicon

Some of you have asked me how to include a favicon in the Chrome Extensions after reading the "how to insert a favicon in blogger".

Chrome Extension MTG Finder favicon

Well, this one is even easier, you only need to put in the chrome manifest file a reference to a 16x16 pixel icon. It doesn't matters if the real image is larger than 16x16 (it can be the same file that you're using in the 128 icon), you only need to insert the following line in the manifest.json file:

<-- start manifest.json -->
{  "name": "MTG Finder",  "version": "1.1.2",  "description": "Displays a popup with the cards found by several mtg websites matching the selected words in the current tab",  "icons": {  "128": "mtg_finder_icon.png",  "48": "mtg_finder_icon.png",  "16": "mtg_finder_icon.png"},
  "options_page": "options.html",  "homepage_url": "http://themunsonsapps.blogspot.com/",  "background_page": "background.html",
<-- more manifest stuff -->
}
<-- end manifest.json -->

Remember that the Chrome Extension will works fine without the bold line, but you won't see the favicon in the pages created by the extension such as the options page.
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Friday, April 1, 2011

Google's April fools day

As you know, april is the humor month. Google brings us two great samples of it: a job position as an autocompleter and a new gmail feature, gmail motion.

Have a look at the gmail motion demo shown below

Google Motion

Sunday, March 20, 2011

MTG Finder 1.1.0

MTG Finder 1.1.0 includes some new features described bellow:

Two new websites have been added to the search modes.

Mtg.ru - This is a great russian website that supports cyrillic charset in the queries. Maybe you want to use this search mode because the popup displayed is smaller than others and is fast and light.
The popup shows the card image, mana cost, types, rarity, expansion (including expansion card number) and artist.
Use this search mode only with english or russian card names.

Mtg.ru search

Tapped Out - Tapped Out is a community that has several mtg tools such as a draft simulator, or a deck database. When you search in MTG Finder through this website, you will find the card image, card data and the more interesting feature: stats of the decks playing this card.
Tapped out search mode allows only card names in english.

Tapped Out search

Context menu search is available. From this version, when you select words in chrome and do right click, a new MTG Finder context menu will be displayed.

MTG Finder Context menu

In this new menu, you will be able to choose one of the existing search modes to search the card in a new window or tab (the Chrome popup seems to be available only clicking it...).
You can choose if the search is done in a new window or tab in the new option of the options menu. Warning: We've noticed that sometimes, when you use this new feature, the window/tab opens, but it shows only the footer. It's an error that we're trying to fix. If you reopen the window/tab with the context menu, it should display normally the second time.

Options page with Tab/window choice

A problem with non utf-8 charset has been fixed in the magiccards.info search. Before, when you searched for a selected word in a language with non-utf-8 (such as russian, japanese, chinese or korean), it used to redirect you to a "card not found" page. Now this has been fixed and you can perform searches of russian, japanese, chinese or korean card names with magiccards.info search.

You can download MTG Finder in the Chrome Webstore Site, and remember, if you liked it, score it with five stars!! :-)
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Thursday, March 17, 2011

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Blogging tips: add favicon and open links on new tab by default

Maybe you have noticed the new icon displayed on the The Munson's Apps tab. This icon is named favicon. If you want to replace the blogger-favicon that everyone has, continue reading this lines.

The Munson's Apps favicon

Adding this to your website or blogger page is so easy (source). You only need to include this code lines in your head tag replacing ICON_URL with the location of your image (it will be displayed as 16x16, if it's greater, it will be auto-resized).

<-- start favicon -->
<link href='ICON_URL.ico' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/x-icon'/>
<link href='ICON_URL.png' rel='icon' type='image/png'/>
<-- end favicon -->

In blogger, you can do this by going to Dashboard -> Template -> Edit HTML and insert it before the </head> tag (search it with Ctrl+F). Remember to save always a backup of the HTML before change it.

One problem that you can find is the .ico file. Maybe you can't create it or simply you don't have where to host it (blogger don't allows to upload .ico files). There are several sites with this purpose. Here I recommend one that I've used: iconj. Iconj is free, you only need to register. It hosts and generates your favicons for you and give you the source code ready to paste in your website's head.

Note that the ico file is only for Internet explorer, so if you don't include the first line, you will be able to see the favicon on Chrome or Firefox, but not in IE.

Other feature recently added to The Munson's Apps is to open all links in a new page. Maybe you know that inserting the target="_blank" attribute on any "a" tag, you will get this result, but doing it for every link is annoying. There is a simple solution to it, copy and paste the following code in the head tag of your blog like you did before with the favicon:

<!-- Open all links on new page -->
<base target='_blank'/>

With those lines, all of your links will be opened with the target='_blank' attribute by default without specifying it.

Updated 23/04/2011: to open all external links in a new window, read Blogging tips: Open all external links in a new page
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Sunday, March 6, 2011

MTG Finder 1.0.0

MTG Finder now supports Apathy House search. This featured has been suggested by several people, so I decided to include it.

This new feautre, allows you to see the price look-upper from Apathy House with its price stats, like this:

Apathy house search

From the 1.0.0 version, MTG Finder will open a "news" page like this one when new versions are released. In this way, you will be able to read the new MTG Finder's features. If there are new options available, the options page will automatically open too.

The options page now includes a Donate button. Now you can contribute with this project in an easier way :-).

Options page

If you think that your website should be part of the MTG Finder searches, you can suggest it commenting this post.

MTG Finder is available for free and with only one click here.