Feels like we're back in the days of the Apple ][, only with a much, much smaller monitor. Things I'd like to see done in the URL bar using the History API:
• Rogue-like text adventure game
• Hitchhiker's Guide
• A reading app with page-turning animation
• Color
Whoever cracks that last one, mega kudos. Woz, you around? Feel like doing some magic?
It's also tempting to ask for a text-editor, but then, we sort of already have that!
That gave me a good laugh! If it is of any interest, in the following video which was posted a while back on HN, Steve Wozniak tells how he co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, and amongst other things, how he hackishly brought color computing to the Apple 2:
Seriously. When you have a thought like that, first ask yourself, how often have you told the same story to 4 different people? Then ask yourself how many of your stories any casual acquantaince has heard 4 times.
After playing for 10 minutes I thought "this is EXACTLY the kind of insane time-waster that I would like to read more content from..." So I tried to remove the # from the title bar as to navigate to your home page.
Turns out that that's harder than the actual game. I won in the end though.
Around the launch of IE9 beta I asked Dean Hachamovitch (IE honcho at MSFT) what he thought about people typing random things (besides URLs) into the navigation bar. I'd noticed not entirely tech-savvy people in my life using the navigation bar as sort of a launch bar for their whole browsing experience, using it for new searches, history exploration, etc.
Hachamovitch reminded me that this was not really a new thing, as people have been using the command line since the dawn of time. Never did this really sink in until I saw this demo: The URL bar is a command line for the people. Behold its power.
The architecture was pretty far along, completely extensible with new verbs and parsers in JS. They'd got rid of the ugly hyphens from that demo video with a better parser. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/0.2_Design:_UI_and_Se... They'd even solved most of the localization problems, like verb-subject-object or subject-verb-object, and pronouns, and stuff. I really would like to see this revisited sometime.
Basically I can type the first few characters of a domain until it autocompletes, then hit tab, then enter a search term which is submitted to that site's own search form, which chrome picked up when I went to the site, using various heuristics.
It's actually not using HTML5 history like the links before. It's just doing hash manipulation.
It it used history.replaceState it could not only manipulate the URL completely but also it wouldn't make history events so the back button would work!
I also played with browser history to create something more useful http://bsearch.heroku.com/ i.e. access other search engines by clicking back button while on Google.
Well, after viewing my history from going to this page, I think that browsers are going to have to come up with a way to group history into collapsible groups. Most likely by a combination of tab and host.
Definitely not looking for to companies using the URL page as the new scrolling status bar...
That's pretty clever. I could see using location.hash for posting scrolling banner messages in the URL bar, ads ... all kinds of stuff that I'm really not looking forward to.
Is it possible in javascript to make a customisable auto-complete for the address bar? Similar to the way browsers use auto-complete based on your history, this would use auto-complete based on the site's hierarchy. It's different to this site because the input events (user controls) are not triggered when typing in the address bar.
For example, a user wanting to find the elephants page on this web site would be typing http://coolstuff.com/things/elep (and it would suggest) hants by having hants appear after elep as selected text.
Or is there a good reason why address bar events are not part of the dom?
It's also tempting to ask for a text-editor, but then, we sort of already have that!