A recent article on tech-recipes.com here that Lifehacker reported set me thinking about other ways to enhance the, little used, Outlook Today pane.
I'm a big fan of TiddlyWiki so it seemed an ideal candidate for integration.
Following the instructions in the tech-recipes article, linking Outlook Today to a TiddlyWiki HTML file leads to a wiki that can be browsed and edited but which unfortunately cannot be saved so, all changes are lost as soon as you navigate away from the page. Basically not much good unless you intend to edit your wiki within a browser which defeats the point of integrating it in the first place.
The solution is to embed the TiddlyWiki file within an iframe. To do this, create a basic wrapper html file containing the following line replacing 'MyWiki.html' with the name of your TiddlyWiki file.
<iframe width='100%' height='100%' border=0 src='MyWiki.html'>
Set this new wrapper file as your Outlook Today page using the instructions from the tech-recipes page.
Once this has been done, you can copy and paste some of the code examples from the tech-recipes page into a default tiddler so that you get a full tiddlywiki embedded in Outlook Today with full access to your Outlook data as well. Remember, you will need to surround any html code with <html> </html> tags in your tiddler.
Please note, this is only tested with Outlook 2003. There have been reports in the comments below that this does not work in Outlook 2007. This is because, in Outlook 2007, Microsoft have dropped Internet Explorer as the HTML and CSS rendering engine in favour of the Word 2007 engine. TiddlyWiki runs in all the mainstream browsers. Word 2007 may render HTML but I doubt that it supports Javascript which is essential for TiddlyWiki.
Links:
Tech-Recipes
Lifehacker
13 comments:
It works great and I'm trying to get the "Object" code into tiddlers without success.
How does one get the code into tiddlers?
Thanks for the hack.
Yea, totally cool hack but I can't get it to display the wiki. I get an error that says "Cannot obtain offline settings for..."
I saved the wiki and the new wrapper in the same folder. What am I missing?
Excellent idea, and great workaround using the iframe. I'm not an outlook user, but I'd do this if I was.
I wonder if it would work as well if you put the outlook code into the wrapper page (MyWiki.html) so that you couldn't possibly lose sight of your Inbox, etc. by closing the tiddler (or accidentally clicking Close All on another tiddler).
@Prashant I'm going to add an update. You need to put <html> </html> tags around the object code within the tiddlers.
@Tim I need to mention that error. I get it too but, if I then click cancel, instead of OK, Outlook goes ahead and displays the wiki anyway.
@Tobias I'm thinking about looking into that possibility soon. Keep a look-out for part two, if I succeed.
The wrapper opens fine with FireFox so I verified that putting the HTML tags around the code works in the wiki. Thanks!
But I don't get a cancel option, only OK. I'm using Outlook 2007 so that may have something to do with it. :-/
I'll keep messing and see if I can figure anything out. Thanks for the update.
Also using 2007 and I can't get it to work. I get an empty iframe. If I change the code to point to file://\MyWiki.html then it gives me scripting errors as well.
I get a popup error from outlook that says:
The webpage could not be found.....
I browsed to my custom file so I don't understand how it can't be found.
:(
Anony, make sure that the wrapper file and the wiki HTML file are in the same folder. Then, to make sure it works, open the wrapper with your web browser.
Anyone found a bunch of custoim outlook today html pages to use as templates? I keep finding how to tweak outlook settings but not custom html pages specifically for OutlookToday.
I did find this excellent example but nothing else:
http://blog.cumps.be/personalizing-outlook-today/
Urgh. According to Microsoft the iframe HTML tag is not supported in Outlook 2007:
Unsupported HTML Elements Compared with the HTML 4.01 Specification
The following is a list of top-level HTML elements that the HTML 4.01 specification supports, but that Word 2007 does not support. Note that Word 2007 considers unsupported HTML elements to be unknown elements.
Word 2007 does not support:...
* iframe
Looks like we'll have to find an alternative method here.
@Tim Even if the Word 2007 engine supported iframes, I doubt TiddlyWiki would work because it is essentially a javascript application and I doubt Word 2007 would like that either.
@fras, yea, you'd think so, huh? But we are talking about Microsoft "security" here after all. I just linked it straight to the wiki and it worked fine. iframe? No. Javascript out the ears? Find.
Go figure.
for ALL:
I jsut did this (as per original notes, + the "duh" put html tags around Iframe item.
I WILL NOT go through my tiddly and wrap code around anything extra.
But it works for me!
Outlook 2003 - point it at you new wrapper page. It give you the good old "Cannot obtain offline settings for...".
Click OK - you are back on the pick a home page form.
Click Cancel. Now your set!
No wacky edits to the tiddly to make it work!
(and yes, I exited back out of outlook and when I restarted it was still set correctly)
Just want to share.
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