If you're a Domino developer and you're not using either Chrome and/or Ytria's ScanEz then you need to stop and question why.

While any browser will do (but Chrome is IMHO the best) you really need to check out ScanEz!

My love of ScanEz is in no way influenced by the fact they gave it me for free. I say it because I genuinely think you'll be better off once using it. My promotion of it is like a public service kind of thing.

Imagine for a second that you do use both. Wouldn't it be nice to link them? To have a button that magically appeared in Chrome when viewing a Domino website, which, when clicked, opens ScanEz straight to the document you're currently viewing in Chrome.

Like this:

For me this is a massive time-saver. If you like the idea you can get it for yourself here.

Here's a quick video of the concept:

Over-Coming Hurdles

It wasn't long after I started working on this that I realised there were two flaws in the idea. Firstly that the hostname used in URLs doesn't always match the actual name of the Notes server. It needs to in order for ScanEz to connect.

As an example, www.codestore.net is hosted on a server called domino-99.codestore.net and ScanEz can't find a route to www.codestore.net but can to the latter. So I added an Options pages for the extension which lets you add a hosts-like list of mappings:

The other hurdle was that not all URLs to Domino document have the document UNID in them. For these cases I had the extension look for a special Meta tag in the HTML of a page, which would look like this:

If it finds this meta tag it knows where to send ScanEz to. Problem solved.

If you're not excited by this then you obviously don't know how brilliant ScanEz is and what you're missing out on. That's a topic for another blog entry though...