Custom GUI plugins for Calibre here...

[kiwidude]

Great links, thanks for sharing, I have added them in the plugin list.

I have also added the ability to optionally specify a submenu name to allow grouping menu item URLs. So for instance you could put all the Amazon related ones under an "Amazon" sub-menu, or perhaps ones you don't use very often under another menu. Just to help keep the context menu manageable if you decide you want to have access to a number of these...

Getting closer to the end, just need to sort out some help text on the dialog and then will be looking for a guinea pig to offer feedback on how well the new version works in the next day or so. It's fully functional now, just a few little things I want to finish off. Any volunteers just send me a PM. Right now I'm heading out for a few hours fishing...

[dasimser]

If it is not too late, here's a few more links that I use. I'm not sure if the Audible links would be appropriate for everyone, but I use Calibre to track my audio books as well (and apparently I'm not alone according to another recent thread "audio books in calibre")

    ('Kobo for Author',    'stip_kobo.png', 'http://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q={author}&t=all&f=author&p=1&s=numpurchases&g=both','utf-8', None),
    ('Kobo for Title',    'stip_kobo.png', 'http://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q={title}&','utf-8', None),
    ('Inkmesh for Book',    'stip_inkmesh.png', 'http://www.inkmesh.com/search/?qs={title}+by+{author}&btnE=Find+Ebooks','utf-8', None),
    ('Audible for Author',    'stip_audible.png', 'http://www.audible.com/search?advsearchKeywords=&searchTitle=&searchAuthor={author}&searchNarrator=&searchProvider=&field_subjectbin=&field_content_type-bin=&field_format-bin=&field_price=&field_product_site_launch_date=&field_runtime=&field_language=English&x=0&y=0','utf-8', None),
    ('Audible for Book',    'stip_audible.png', 'http://www.audible.com/search?advsearchKeywords=&searchTitle={title}&searchAuthor={author}&searchNarrator=&searchProvider=&field_subjectbin=&field_content_type-bin=&field_format-bin=&field_price=&field_product_site_launch_date=&field_runtime=&field_language=English&x=0&y=0','utf-8', None),

[kiwidude]

Definitely not too late for yours and others, it will be a couple more days at least before I post the plugin. Will add your links to the list, thanks.

I'm not too worried about "less common" urls, they just won't be active by default and saves the effort of creating for the other people that do want to share them. For instance I followed the suggestion above of adding all the various Amazon country website links -only the .com one will be in the menu by default but any international Calibre users can just tick the extra ones they want.

[Bertrand]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

I have also added the ability to optionally specify a submenu name to allow grouping menu item URLs.

Wow, this is great !

I wonder if it would be possible to have an option to select a bunch of favorites URLs and open them at the same time in the browser ?
That would be very useful... at least for me
I often open a site via the plugin, don't find want I want (comments, covers, etc.), go back in calibre, open an other website, and so on.

Thanks for your plugin. I use it all the time !

Some URLs I use, for French ebooks :

stip_search_internet_menus = [
	('Le titre sur la Fnac', 'stip_fnac.png', 'http://recherche.fnac.com/Search/SearchResult.aspx?SCat=2&Search={title}', 'utf-8'),
	('Le titre sur Amazon.fr', 'stip_amazon.png', 'http://www.amazon.fr/s/ref=nb_ss?__mk_fr_FR=%C5M%C5Z%D5%D1&url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords={title}', 'latin-1'),
	('Le titre sur Google', 'stip_google.png',  'http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&q={author}+"{title}"', 'utf-8'),
	('Le titre sur Wikipedia', 'stip_wikipedia.png', 'http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sp%E9cial%3ARecherche&search={title}', 'utf-8'),
	('Le titre sur Chapitre.com', 'stip_chapitre_com.png', 'http://www.chapitre.com/CHAPITRE/fr/search/Default.aspx?optSearch=BOOKS&titre={title}', 'utf-8', None),
	    
	(None, None, None, None),
	('L\'auteur sur Wikipedia', 'stip_wikipedia.png', 'http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sp%E9cial%3ARecherche&search={author}', 'utf-8'),

	(None, None, None, None),
	('Images Google pour le livre', 'stip_google.png', 'http://www.google.com/images?q={author}+{title}', 'utf-8', _('Alt+I'))]

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by Bertrand

I wonder if it would be possible to have an option to select a bunch of favorites URLs and open them at the same time in the browser ?
That would be very useful... at least for me

Yeah I've wondered about this a few times, as like you the workflow is "attempt the most promising site" and then if that fails start falling back to others. The downside of launching multiple sites automatically however is you end up spawning a bunch of tabs in your browser that you then have to close (unless you close the whole browser of course).

My current alternative to this was to add the option of keyboard shortcuts for each menu item, so at least you didn't have to move the mouse and right-click etc, though you do have to switch focus back to Calibre first of course. I see from your tweak config above (thanks for those btw) that you hadn't as yet upgraded to 1.3 of the plugin I posted last which supports shortcuts. I guess my question to you is once you do have keyboard shortcut ability whether they would assist you sufficiently to not need the feature?

EDIT: Sorry, I just looked closer at your URLs and now see you do have keyboard shortcuts configured so are using 1.3. Guess that answers my question about whether you still want the feature

However if others want this feature too (and they respond here soon enough!) then I'm happy to consider it. The difficulty is how to represent this without making it all too complex for everyone who never wants it. One approach that comes to mind is to add a second checkbox column to the grid that you can tick for each row you want to be part of an "Open multiple sites" menu action. This menu action would appear at the bottom of the menu if it had any "members" ticked and would be possible to have it's own keyboard shortcut configured too.

As I said if others think it would be useful or have ideas for alternative simpler implementations then speak now...

[Bertrand]

The downside of launching multiple sites automatically however is you end up spawning a bunch of tabs in your browser that you then have to close

Not a deal-breaker for me. I often have 10, 15 tabs open in Firefox.
And when it's too crowded, I just right-click on a tab > Close All Tabs.
Let's see what others are saying.

One approach that comes to mind is to add a second checkbox column to the grid that you can tick for each row you want to be part of an "Open multiple sites" menu action.

That sounds good and easily understandable. I don't see anything "complexe" here :-)

[Maggie-Me]

Great job, I use I use the search internet all the time !

[kiwidude]

Would really appreciate any feedback on screenshots below before I post the plugin itself - anything obvious you see missing, confusing etc.

What is different in this version?

• First screenshot shows the "default" menu you will see. Similar to the existing plugin except the links happen to be alphabetically sorted.
• The "Configure plugin..." menu item at the bottom of the menu takes you straight to the new configuration dialog pictured in the second screenshot. You can also get to it via the conventional Preferences->Plugins->Customize approach.
• The new configuration dialog replaces using Tweaks. Hopefully more user friendly to use, less "hidden" and importantly won't require restarts of Calibre for changes to your menus to take effect. The downside is a one-off of no backwards compatibility if you had used Tweaks previously - you will have to reconfigure it using the new dialog.
• As mentioned in previous posts it comes with a whole bunch of websites preconfigured, you just tick the ones you want to see and move up/down as you like.
• Ability to group websites into sub-menus as you prefer. For instance all the ones you go to less frequently but still want access to without filling up your screen with a giant menu!
• As per Bertrand's request, the ability to open multiple websites with a single menu item/keyboard shortcut called "Open Group". If you don't have any websites ticked the menu item does not appear in your menu.
• Some slight logic changes to passing the Author to a website. It now attempts to pass it in FN LN format regardless of whether you store in Calibre as FN LN or LN, FN. Some websites with crappy search engines like Kobo require FN LN format or they won't find matches.
• An HTML help page that can be opened from the configuration dialog.
• Last screenshot just shows what a menu "might" look like using the various features.

[Bertrand]

Nice !

Some questions :

I see an "Add" button :

How do you create or edit a url/submenu/encoding/etc ?

1 Directly in the row or do you open a new dialog box ?

If the latter :

2 About websites icons : do we have to enter the filename, or is it possible to browse and choose an image somewhere on the disk ?

3 Maybe the "Encoding" colum could be a drop down menu ?

(All this to avoid manually typing or to do bad copy & paste)

Thanks, and again, very nice job !

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by Bertrand

I see an "Add" button :

How do you create or edit a url/submenu/encoding/etc ?

1 Directly in the row or do you open a new dialog box ?

You edit directly in the row in a grid, double clicking in a cell. The add button just allows a new row to appear below the currently selected one.

Originally Posted by Bertrand

2 About websites icons : do we have to enter the filename, or is it possible to browse and choose an image somewhere on the disk ?

Interesting question. There is a google website you can use to retrieve the favicon from a website (it converts it into a png that you can just save to disk). I had already put instructions and the url etc in the help file. I did wonder about automating this though - sadly I don't think my Python skills are up to the challenge. It would be nice if you could just right-click on a row after pasting in the search url and select "Retrieve image" and have it automatically put it into the resources\images directly for you.

Part of the issue with that is that sometimes it is only the top-level domain url that has the favicon associated with it. So the user would have to type the domain in which often varies significantly from what you type as a search query. So it all starts getting a bit hard.

Another idea I had considered was importing an image via as you say a file chooser dialog and that being placed into the Calibre directory. That could be a simpler compromise... perhaps...

Originally Posted by Bertrand

3 Maybe the "Encoding" colum could be a drop down menu ?

Yeah I've been thinking about that one too. My hesitation was not knowing what values to put in the dropdown - is utf-8 and latin-1 sufficient for instance. Right now a new row you add will have the encoding defaulted to utf-8.

Thanks again for your feedback - in this case things I had considered but wasn't sure if others would "miss" if I didn't implement. That you bring them up in the first response tells me a few are worth more investigation...

[garcle]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Would really appreciate any feedback on screenshots below before I post the plugin itself - anything obvious you see missing, confusing etc.[LIST][*]The "Configure plugin..." menu item at the bottom of the menu takes you straight to the new configuration dialog pictured in the second screenshot. You can also get to it via the conventional Preferences->Plugins->Customize approach.

It looks great and very useful upgrade!!
My only concern is the icons too, will that field accept a full path, or is it expecting the icons in a specific location?

p.s.
It would be cool to have the plugin version number next to the name in the first post in this thread!

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by garcle

It looks great and very useful upgrade!!
My only concern is the icons too, will that field accept a full path, or is it expecting the icons in a specific location?

The icons will need to be in a specific Calibre location. As I put in the reply to Bertrand one thing I am considering is an "import" type feature which will copy the image from wherever you have it into the right location for you, simplifying that step in the process.

Originally Posted by garcle

p.s.
It would be cool to have the plugin version number next to the name in the first post in this thread!

Nice suggestion. I had been wondering about putting a date or something, perhaps I shall put both version and date of last update on the index.
[EDIT:] Index updated

[Bertrand]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Part of the issue with that is that sometimes it is only the top-level domain url that has the favicon associated with it. So the user would have to type the domain in which often varies significantly from what you type as a search query. So it all starts getting a bit hard.

I usually dive in the source code of the web page to find the favicon, but it doesn't have to be a favicon.ico. Users should be able to use their own images if they want to, that's why I thought to browse and choose an image in the computer.
(You 'll have to check the extension, and maybe dimensions of the file ? I don't know if jpg, or gif are accepted ?)

Encoding should be fine with these two values. But if you have a drop down menu, you can always add other values later, if there is a need for it, instead of letting the user guessing what value he should put here (and making typos...)
You have a more precise control over the value that should be written here.

[kiwidude]

Thanks to the feedback here I have enhanced the upcoming version with a few more features as shown in the attached screenshots:

• Dropdown box for encodings, choices of Utf-8 or Latin-1
• Dropdown box for images, listing all found within the zip and custom images folder.
• Images dropdown includes a "Add New Image..." menu item at the very bottom, launching the second dialog pictured. This allows you to directly pull the favicon from a website domain, or copy a .png file from elsewhere on your disk.
• Context menu option to move all of the active menu items to the top of the grid for you, rather than you having to move them manually if you want to see them without scrolling.
• Context menu option to explore the custom resource images folder, with option to create if not existing.

As always, feedback appreciated.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Thanks to the feedback here I have enhanced the upcoming version with a few more features as shown in the attached screenshots

Looks great.