Sweet Enhancements to the WebCenter Chrome Extension

Rich (@rmanlan) and Anthony (@anthonyslai) have been heads-down enhancing the WebCenter Chrome extension for quite some time now.

Today, Rich let me know it’s nearly done and almost ready for some beta testing.

The extension still posts to WebCenter and shows you your activity stream, which is pretty sweet in and of itself, but it also does browser capture, markup and upload to WebCenter UCM. Rich teased adding upload to consumer sites, e.g. Flickr and Picasa, but I’m not sure they’ve had time to build those yet.

What’s the big deal?

Well, think about all the times you’ve wanted to show someone what you see in a browser window. It’s more than you’d think offhand, and this use case is the bread and butter of web application developers, which we are.

You might already use OS tools like OS X’s native screen capture shortcuts (or the little-known Grab app that comes with OS X), Skitch, Jing, HyperSnap, etc. to accomplish this.

How much easier would it be if you had this same functionality in your browser? With the ability to markup the capture. And the ability to upload it to a location for sharing. Oh, and the ability to share it to a collaborative application like WebCenter, where it could be displayed inline in the activity stream?

Pretty sweet, right.

Anyway, I’ve included a sanitized screen capture that Rich shared. I’m hoping to get the extension updated later this week and take it for a spin.

If you’re an employee, hit me up for details on how to get and use this extension. If you’re not, come to OpenWorld and attend our session, where the guys will be demonstrating this and other cool WebCenter stuff they’ve built, as well as sharing code and ideas.

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