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Pin TMS
Monday, April 11, 2011
Internet Explorer 9 introduces a new feature: pinned sites that offer better integration with the Windows 7 desktop. Basically this comes down to the capability to add a website to the Windows 7 taskbar and it can be controlled from the website what jumplist items will appears for the taskbar pinned item. In this jumplist, a website can put links to specific frequently visited areas of the website. You can start diving into all the details of the new capabilities of Internet Explorer 9 pinned sites in this MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg491731(v=VS.85).aspx.Out of curiosity, we've now also implemented this feature for the TMS website and this is how it looks:
Each jumplist item that was added is specified via a meta tag on the web page. The structure of the meta tag for a jump list item is:
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Support; action-uri=./support.asp; icon-uri=/site/ico/help_24.ico">
For some reason, Microsoft decided that 5 jump list items are enough, which seems a bit limited in my opinion. Other than this, there is also a Javascript API to manipulate jump list items and to overlay images on the taskbar pinned item. This could be used for example to show a small balloon indicator with a number of new items on the website. Also here, a limitation is that the overlay can only be a static image, so, to be able to handle any number of "new items" that can be indicated, you'd need to build a large set of overlay images all with different numbers.
All in all, the new pinned sites are a nice & practical feature in Internet Explorer 9 for frequently visited website. I have been told that future versions of Chrome would also support it. So, make your website also taskbar pin ready.
Bruno Fierens
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