*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I’ve got to catch up on a few blog entries from a few sessions today but I want to take a little extra time to write up a little nicer article on them.  Until then I thought I would throw out a few IE 7 tips that Dave Massey spoke to us about.  Here is the first one up.

I’ve been using IE 7 for a few months and I really like the tab browsing.  But that’s not the only reason users are going to like IE 7.  However, I’m a keyboard hot key nut.  One of the features I like is the tab browsing preview.  Let’s say you have 6 tabs open and you want to go to a certain tab, but you can’t remember which one it is in.  The best way to accomplish this is to use the quick view.  Here’s a screen shot:

(hotkey – CTRL-Q)

Once you hit CTRL-Q you can view all the tabs you have open and then use arrow keys to navigate.  Another useful feature is one Jason mentioned earlier whereby you can type in something like “apple” and then press ctrl-enter and it will add http://www.  and .com to the end giving you http://www.apple.com. 

Dave also turned us onto a quick reference guide on the IE7 blog where they have a quick reference that lists a lot of the hot keys.  Some other ones that are worthy of mentioning are ALT-ENTER which opens a search in a new window.  IE 7 also allows you to add your own search engine into IE 7 really easy.  Go here to look at companies that are already adopting this.  Kinda interesting because if you add this HTML into your page, IE 7 will auto detect your site’s search and allow users to add it to their browser.

<link rel=”search” type=”application/opensearchdescription+xml” title=”Ebay” href=http://yourdomain.com/file.xml />

Here is a sample Ebay xml file from the list of sites:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/“>
<ShortName>eBay</ShortName>
<Description>Search Online Auctions</Description>
<Url type=”text/html“ template=”http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle={searchTerms}“ />
</OpenSearchDescription>

For more information about how to use the Open Search definition see this url:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/external/overview/ie7_opensearch_ext.asp