For Firefox only, sorry.

So, Devo is one of my recent and yet most favorite and almost always used Firefox extension, alongside Todoist. I haven’t written about Todoist yet if you’re thinking of asking where it is, coz Devo beat it when it comes to simplicity. Since talking about Devo will be easier and faster and shorter than talking about Todoist, I’ll take on it first.

Devo, to put it simply, is like an application launcher for Firefox. With two keystrokes and keywords, you can minimize the effort it usually takes to search something (instead of opening a new tab, opening Google and hitting Enter).

So how does it work?

Installation:

** first, download the Devo Firefox extension from here. You might have to sign up for an account though, coz Devo is an experimental plugin and downloading experimental plugins require users to login. It’s a free account though, and it’s worth it if it’s just to get hands on this. Or, of course, if you really don’t want to, you can download it straight from their site, click here.

** install the extension. If you went to their site and downloaded it from there, you probably got a file with a .xpi extension (the file extension for Firefox plugins). To install it, double click on it and choose Firefox from the list of programs once it prompts for what program to use to open it.

** Restart Firefox

Using Devo:

** to start, press Shift X and you’ll see something like this:

author’s note: guess what, I just had trouble typing that.. LOL

of course, I typed the text google edward norton in there. SO basically, what this command does (as described by that group of text above it) is that it does a Google search for ‘edward norton’. Hitting the Enter key after that will open a new tab with the Google results page for that particular search string.

There are other keywords available, like:

IMDB – which does a search on IMDB

dictionary – which does a dictionary search of the term

wikipedia – which does a Wikipedia search.

…and plenty more other keywords, accessible by typing help in the textbox, which will then bring you to a page that looks like this:

In that page, you’ll be able to view all the commands currently listed (under Action Manager) and to add a new action (Add New Action).

Adding New Action

This is perhaps one of the things that makes Devo a really cool Firefox extension; you can add more commands, depending on what you need.

So, to demonstrate how to do it, we’ll add an action that’s very much related to the previous post about Torrents; we’ll add a Mininova search command.

** press Shift X to open activate Devo

** type help in the textbox and press Enter. The page in the previous shot is displayed.

** click the Add New Action link at the top. The Add an Action page is displayed

** type a keyword. The keyword is what you type first in the Devo pop up and signifies the command you want to use. Since we’re doing a search command for Mininova, type mininova in the keyword textbox.

** type a Param. Param is the the description of the parameter or, in simpler terms, the search string.  Type movie or something like that.

** under Description, describe what the action does. This one will appear above the Devo textbox. For this sample, type Does a torrent search on Mininova for your search string.

** in the code text area, paste this:

devo_newTab(”http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=” + devo_param)

where:

devo_newTab is the function that opens a new tab that will display the page.

http://www.mininova.org/search/?search= is the page url of the results page.

devo_param is the parameter or the search string that a user will type in the Devo textbox. That, combined with the page url of the results page.

** click the Add button in the bottom of the page to save it.

** test the new action!

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