Better Browsing for Ruby Developers | Hacker News Reader

Better Browsing for Ruby Developers

omniref.com

69 pointstimr27 comments

Omniref looks very nice. My quick (minor) feedback:

1. I wish I could resize the code/documentation panes to give more space to the documentation, or even collapse the code compeltely

2. A little syntax highlighting in the method signatures in the documentation would be nice.

+1 on 1. I look at Ruby class documentation a lot. I don't think I've ever wanted to look at the Ruby C source. I'm not sure what the point is of seeing them side-by-side. As far as I can tell, there isn't even any vertical correlation between the class documentation and the C code. Just the Ruby docs, please.

Thanks!

We're doing #1 -- look for that in the next week or two -- and I'll add #2 to our to-do list.

Looks very useful.. but does not seem to work on localised google domains.. e.g. google.com.au

Any chance of getting that fixed?

Yep. We were too restrictive in our domain settings! We'll be pushing a fix soon, but it will take a little while to work through the approval process. I'll Tweet when there's an update (@omniref).

Excellent..

I installed it but don't get annotations on the same page as shown on the screenshot (activerecord/scoping).

Send me an email at support@omniref with your browser info (type, version, installed extensions, etc.) and I'll look into it.

That's tricky code to get right; github uses jquery-based fast-loading of their source pages, and the extension security models make it particularly difficult to detect the change events (especially on Firefox :-/).

Will do, but it is Chrome on Mac with Diasconnect and Adblock Plus and maybe some others. No exceptions in the console (global, not the background page one)

same here. Nothing happens. => https://cloudup.com/ck9BPBaopFz

I think you're having a different problem, actually -- the OP was having trouble with the GitHub integration. Send me an email at support@omniref with the same information, and I'll look into it.

This is the first wider release of the extensions, so I'm not surprised there are a few bugs. Thanks for bearing with us while we fix them!

Does every search-term hit an external service to see if it matches something ruby related?

It does right now, yes. But it's completely asynchronous and it falls back gracefully, so you shouldn't notice any performance impacts.

I think the issue is more that there's this external service that knows all your google searches.

We've been thinking about other ways to do it (e.g. restricting via bloom filter), but ultimately, there's so much content on Omniref that we're going to match most queries for something.

It's disabled for incognito mode, and the query data is used only to hit our search index. If this is still an issue for you, we can put a setting in to allow disabling of this feature for privacy.

Right. A good solution would be a bloom filter that ships in the extension of relevant terms.

We thought about that, but we have a lot of content. Perhaps if we just limited the filter to something like method/class/module/gem names it would work, but even that would hit on so many searches that most would be coming back to us. We'd be restricting the utility of the feature without much gain.

That said, we're open to suggestions on how to improve this. We're very respectful of privacy -- omniref is SSL-only, for example, and we don't save anything that could be traced back to a user or an IP.

I don't think a product that depends on reading my search history is ready for release. That's a serious invasion of one's privacy and something that will make lots of people (I would hope most) not consider installing it. Perhaps there could be a way to opt-in specific searches (but is it much different from a bookmark with a keyword in that case?)

We understand what you're saying. But you'll have to excuse us if we're still not comfortable with giving you all our information and then having to trust just your word on what you do with the data.

Sure, I get it. We'll add a preference in for disabling this, but in the meantime, you vote with your installs. My point is only that we haven't yet thought of a way of implementing this feature that is likely to satisfy you -- but again, we're open to suggestions.

Can you proxy the searches through something like tor?

Perhaps Disconnect search might work with this. Then both Omniref and Google can mind their own business.

There are some very serious privacy concerns that need to be addressed with this plugin

That would be which? Does the plugin send every search request made to google to the omniref servers? Did you have a look at the implementation? @timr could you give some more info on how you accomplish this?

Are DuckDuckGo instant answers being considered as well?

Wish Python Developers got the same love

Check out the Sourcegraph Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph/dgjhfo.... It links Python code on GitHub (though it doesn't have the cool feature of inlining a results box on Google searches)

(note: I'm one of the creators of Sourcegraph, would love to hear any feedback!)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com