For many here, Web Intents need no introduction. For others, let me start with a short and easy to understand intro.

Ever used “Share” option in Android? Noticed how any new app you install show up in that list? How is it possible for all these applications to work together, or say interconnected in one way?

That’s intents right there.

What if we can bring the same feature to your browser? Say, you write an app for Chrome, and just say, you want to be listed in intents, you show up in that list. Here is the official description.

Users use many different services on the web to handle their day to day tasks, such as sharing images, editing documents and listening to music. They expect their applications to be connected and to work together seamlessly.

It is impossible for developers to anticipate every new service and to integrate with every existing external service that their users prefer, and thus they must choose to integrate with a few select APIs at great expense to the developer.

Web Intents solves this. Web Intents is a framework for client-side service discovery and inter-application communication. Services register their intention to be able to handle an action on the user’s behalf. Applications request to start an Action of a certain verb (share, edit, view, pick etc.) and the system will find the appropriate Services for the user to use based on the user’s preference.

How Are They Different From Extensions

Simple, easy to implement. No need for extra coding for making an extension communicate with another. I am sure developers will have so much to say about this. Right guys?

Let’s Get To The List

webintents.org team has added some  webintents extensions for users to try out. I found 13 of them for you. There were couple of others, but I am listing only those from webintents.org here.

1. Save to Instapaper :
2. Share to Reddit™
3. Share to Digg™:
4. Save to Box:
5. Save to ReadItLater:
6. Shorten with Goo.gl:
7. Shorten with Bit.ly:
8. Share to Blogger™:
9. Share to Delicious™:
10. Share to LinkedIn™:
11. Share to Tumblr™:
12. Share to Gmail™:
13. Share Link to Twitter™:

 How To Use Web Intents on Google Chrome

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find demos to use all of these intents. I will update it as soon as I find them. Here is how you can try web intents now.

Enable Web Intents

Here is how to enable web intents on Chrome. Go to settings page and simple search for “intents”. Make sure that you have “Allow Web Intents to enable me to connect my applications.” checked.

Now, visit this demo page http://demos.webintents.org/ . Enter a web address (complete with http://) and click “Save”. You will get a popup asking you to pick one of the intents, and add it to Chrome. Click add, and you will be redirected to the “Save” page. Its simple, try it out!

Hope you enjoyed a preview of the future web. If you have more info to add, demos to share, jump in.

Developer News – A not so neat little trick. I found this cool post on Digital Inspiration which tells you how to view the source of a Chrome extension.

Why should you view the source? Here are the two main reasons according to the blogger on DI.

There are two main reasons why you may want to read the source code of any Google Chrome extension (including Web Apps and Chrome Themes):

1. If the Chrome extension has been created by an unknown developer,  you want to ensure that it does what the description says and nothing more. You would not like to download a Chrome extension on your machine that tracks your search logs or browsing history.
2. You are learning how to write a Chrome extension (or theme) and are curious to know how some of the good extensions have been written. The licenses of some Chrome extensions may even allow code reuse with attribution.

However many developers share their source code and invite everyone to take a look at it and contribute. But most of them won’t do that.

So, ready to grab the source of an extension?  Here is the full post with easy instructions. They have listed a way to get the source of extensions installed on your Chrome, and also a nice little bookmarklet that lets you download the source without installing the extension. So cool!

This is what Thinking Outside The Box really means.

Introducing Language Immersion for Chrome, a nice little extension that sprinkles words from a language that you pick, on webpages you visit.

You are “immersed” in this new language. You find them on pages, articles and blogs, and read through them. The extension gives you support with translations and pronunciations.

Language Immersion for Chrome – experimental Chrome Extension

Here is what developers have to say about their new extension

Language Immersion for Chrome is an experimental extension that aims to simulate the experience of being immersed in a foreign language. By switching certain words and phrases from English into a language of your choice, the websites you already visit can provide a way to experience the world from a different perspective.

Now, Features

• Choose from all 64 languages currently supported by Google Translate.
• Novice-to-fluent skill settings let you immerse at your own pace.
• Click on a translated word to switch it back to English.
• Roll-over a translated word to hear it pronounced.

This extension is truly experimental for now. But, it is really fun thing to use, and you will start learning words from the new language of your choice.

Install the extension from here

Which language is your pick?

Now that we have Google Drive ready (you all got accounts right?) and integrated with Chrome OS, let us go hunt down some Chrome Extensions for Google Drive. They are slowly coming out and we should see some soon. So, stay tuned for more interesting Chrome Extension for Google Drive!

The “Save Gmail Attachments to Drive” extension was originally a Save to Google Drive extension that got updated for Google Drive. As the name suggests, it lets you save attachments from Gmail to Google Drive, with a single click.

After you install this extension, every email attachment you get on Gmail will have a “Save To Drive” link with it. Click this to save the attachment to your Google Drive account.

This is an actively maintained/developed extension from the looks of it. The Developer is listening to user feedback and making improvements gradually.

Get the extension from here.

Is there any Chrome Extension for Google Drive that you would like to see? Any ideas for developers to work on?

Google Drive was released to the whole world today. I posted “15 Chrome Apps That Work With Your New Google Drive” soon after that. While looking at those apps, I found something cool. They all had a Gdrive icon on them and a tag “Works With Google Drive”.

Yes, Google has added a new section in the Chrome Webstore for Apps which work with Google Drive.

Google Drive is an platform developers can build their applications on. So can expect loads of new apps and extensions coming out to the Chrome web store which take advantage of this. Google wants to curate all of them for you and present a nice set of apps to choose from.

If you open up an app from the store which works with GDrive, you will see the following icon with a mouse over message “This app works with Google Drive.”

See the”Show All” link?  It will will take you to this page. This is the new category called “Drive Apps”

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/drive_apps

Here, you will see a collection of Chrome Web Apps which work with Google Drive. At the time of writing this, I see 17 apps there. We will see this list growing in coming days.

I’ll keep you all posted on new developments there! But do me a favor, if you find some cool stuff there, drop me an email! I’ll share it with my friends here.

ps: did you install Google Drive on your computer and Android phone yet? How is it going so far? How different is this from Dropbox?

Need to reply to an e-mail in Chinese? - Want to join the Google+ conversation with your Hindi-speaking friends? -This Chrome extension from Google will help you! Meet “Google Input Tools”

The Google Input Tools extension provides virtual keyboards for over 70 languages, and full IMEs or direct transliteration for over 20 different scripts. Never heard “transliteration” before? Its the online service wherein you type words using English alphabets and then get them converted to the script/language that you have selected. You can take a look here.

I use the transliteration website whenever I need something typed in my mother tongue. But, with this extension, you can carry that power all around the web. With just  a mouse click, you can start typing in your own language.

When you first install the extension, click on the extension icon, then select “Extension Options” in the pop-up menu. A new tab will appear where you can select your preferred languages or input methods. The keyboards or IMEs you add to ‘Selected input tools’ can be enabled at any time from the extension itself. You can always return to this options page to add, remove, or change the order of your input tools.

To use an input tool, simply click on the extension icon, select the desired language tool in the pop-up menu, then click on any text box on the web page. To turn off an input tool, click on the extension icon and select the “Turn Off” option.

Get the extension here.

Using Google Plus? Google Chrome? Well, this will be a really interesting post for you. I am going to introduce you to a nice little extension named “Extended Embed for Google Plus”. This will supercharge your sharing on Google Plus.

I’ll explain with an example. Imagine you found a cool sound track on Sound Cloud . You hit share to Google Plus and it shows up on your stream. Sound Cloud entry minus the track right? Yes, Google Plus will embed it as a link, may be with a small thumbnail image. Your friends should click on the link, open up Sound Cloud and then play that track.

What if you can embed the track itself, allowing your friends to play it with just a mouse click? What if your share looked exactly like it does on Sound Cloud’s website?

Yes, this is possible. And it is possible not just with Sound Cloud, but with a variety of websites including Flickr and Slideshare. Embed the entire content, not just the link. (Not sure how much they will like this though!)

Now, here is how the developer likes to introduce his brilliant extension.

Are you frustrated that your not seeing rich interactive content the way you wanted to?

When you see attached content such as a photo from Flickr and Smugmug, a song from Soundcloud, a video from Hulu and revision3, or even a slide from Slideshare, it will now look Beautiful, Interactive, and Alive!

Get the extension here. And if you wants to help with some coding, source is available here.

Google Offers is available only in selected cities so, there will be very less takers for this extension, but still, I am sure this extension will bring more visitors to the service, mostly those who sign up and then forget or too lazy to keep checking for offers and I think that’s exactly what Google Offers team wants.

This is one such service that a browser extension can make a lot of difference on. Do you agree?

The Google Offers extension brings great deals straight to the Chrome experience. With the click of a button you can browse and discover amazing local places to eat, shop, and play and share them across your social networks easily.

Never miss another deal with the Google Offers Chrome extension: We will let you know when new deals pop up in your city, whether they’re from Google or any of our partners such as Gilt City, kgbdeals and zozi. If you see a deal that you know your friends will love, sharing it via Google+, email or any of your other favorite social networks is a breeze: Just click the ‘Share’ button and you’re good to go.

Google Offers Extension for Chrome`

I’ve never used Google Offers, or any service of that kind. How many of you use Groupon or Google Offers? How is the whole experience like guys? I am curious Well, not to curious to try it out though!

Get The Extension Here

Read It Later is my favorite android app and I use it every day. Today’s update on Google Play brought me a nice little surprise, a re-branded, re-designed, and re-imagined Read It Later App, new name? “Pocket”

Even though I loved using Pocket App, adding articles to it from chrome was not a smooth experience. There were some un-official extensions listed but none worked perfectly. This is now resolved, with the new official Chrome Extension from the team.

You will get a nice little icon on the toolbar to add any article to your Pocket list. It also adds an entry to the context menu so that you can right click on any webpage and add it your reading list.

The team has done an amazing job redesigning the app and making the entire experience effortless by adding this new Chrome Extension.

Guys at Pocket, good job!!!!

Get the extension here.

Okay, I know you have seen many extensions showing you or helping you block any service that is tracking you from your browser. However, this one is slightly different because this give you a live visualization of what’s happening when you visit a website.

Install the extension, visit one of your favorite websites, and then click on the icon. It will start with an empty list, but will start showing trackers one by one. It uses different color codes to categorize different types of track.

The extension gives you a visual presentation of the “interconnections” in tracking. That is, when you visit a webpage, there are websites or social networks that’s connected through that website which collects your data. Yes, they get those information without making you visit their website. This happens mostly with advertisements.

This will be a really useful and easy to use tool for any one who is curious about privacy. You can read more about this extension and install it from Tools page @ disconnect.me