The latest and greatest (so far) Internet Explorer 9 introduces a new kind of bookmarks. It is now possible to drag an IE Tab to your Windows 7 taskbar and have it pinned there.
IE9 supports quite some integration with your taskbar; customized icon, icon overlays (eg. show a little bell when you’ve got mail), popup task list, make the icon flash when action is required, jump list and some more.
This is quite a smart move of Microsoft, in my opinion, since the web is centering alot around applications as of late.
Most of the integration options can be configured in metatags as i will demonstrate. This is just a small preview and a lot more features are available for you.
Some easy – fast to integrate customizations:
- application-name: determines the name of your web-application; this will be the name of your shortcut
- msapplication-tooltip: determines what is shown when one hovers the pinned site icon
- msapplication-starturl: the default start url of your web app, if not specified this will be the page that the user was on when he dragged the IE tab to his Windows taskbar
- msapplication-navbutton-color: yes you can change the color of the navigate buttons, this property will take any hex value and when left blank will determine the color of the buttons based on your favicon
to add a 32 x 32 favicon you can add: <link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”images/large.ico”/>
Drag the tab to your windows taskbar like so:
After adding the tab the taskbar should look something like this:
Adding a Jump List
The jump list is the list you get to see when you right click the pinned program. This is an easy way to let your user navigate to much used pages.
Here’s how you go about it; the tasks are all defined with meta tags once more.
<meta name=”msapplication-task” content=”name=Mijn Zoekertjes;action-uri=http://local.zooka.be/myaccount.aspx;icon-uri=http://local.zooka.be/images/editimage.ico” />
There is even support for different category dividers within the jump list.
Obviously this is just a small samle. In real life applications you can easily parameterize these metatags to build up dynamically according to your user’s needs and wishes.
