Context Peek, Display Information In Popups
Sometimes when you surf around the Internet you may feel the need to look up additional information. This can be a definition of a word that you are not sure about, information about a phrase at an online encyclopedia or a location on Google Maps. Whatever it is, it usually leads to opening a new tab or browser window to perform the operation.
Context Peek is a Firefox add-on that streamlines the process by displaying the information in a small popup next to the select word or phrase on the page.
The add-on is very versatile, as it allows you to configure your own services in addition to the default services it ships with. The three look-up services it ships with are Wikipedia, the Free Dictionary and Google Translate.
Lets take a look at how it works first before taking a look at the configuration of new services.
All you need to do to use the add-on is to select a word, phrase or sentence first. You then right-click the selection and select Context Peek > Service from the context menu.
The add-on opens the information provided by the selected service in a popup which auto-closes when you click outside the popup window.
To configure existing services and add new ones, you select Context Peek > Configure from the menu.
Configuration is a little bit tricky as you need to have a target url at hand to add new services. You can basically add any server that uses parameters in the url. Lets take Amazon
You then take the target url
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=TEST&x=6&y=15
and replace TEST with the variable used by Context Peek which is CPTEXT so that your target url for Amazon would look like the following:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=CPTEXT&x=6&y=15
All that is left now is to enter a title that appears in the context menu to add the new option to the available services.
Context Peek's configuration can be a bit tricky. It could however be well worth the troubles as it provides an elegant way of looking up information on the Internet without having to open a secondary tab or browser window to do so.
Firefox users can install the add-on from the official Mozilla add-on repository. The add-on itself requires no browser restart. Changes to the configuration on the other hand do.
Currently I’m using the ‘QuickWiki’ add-on which connects you to a resumed version of ‘Wikipedia’ and ‘Wiktionary’ via a small pop-up box.
Context-peek sounds like it is more customisable, I’m willing to give it a try.
Goodo, been looking for something like this. Thanks Martin, you the man.