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Anyone remember Internet Address Detectors?
Authored by: derrickbass on Feb 27, '03 06:12:43PM

Back when, I think, Mac OS 8 came out Apple introduced a really cool technology called "Apple Data Detectors." The idea was then when you popped-up a contextual menu various plug-ins could scan the text and produce custom menus based on the content. "Internet Address Detectors" was one such plug-in... it would scan text for anything that looked like an internet address and provide a menu to allow you to view it in a web browser, FTP to it, or whatever you wanted. The coolest thing was that you did not have to select the URL exactly; you just had to make sure it was contained in the selection. In fact, you could do a select-all and get a menu for every internet address in the whole selection (from whatever program you were in).

Now THAT was cool. I wish they'd bring it back.



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Anyone remember Internet Address Detectors?
Authored by: JohnnyMnemonic on Feb 27, '03 09:43:46PM

I remember them. They were cool. IceCoffee mentioned above comes close; unfortunately, Safari requires that you select the text carefully (most other apps allow you to click anywhere in the URL).

Also, IceCoffee only does URLs, I believe; Apple Data Detectors also worked with ftp, email addresses, etc. Why it was killed, who knows; but maybe IceCoffee could be expanded to include this stuff also? Is IC open source?

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