| Last Modified On : | September 26, 2007 1:01 AM PDT |
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There are several levels at which one can use Intel Mash Maker. We anticipate that the majority of Mash Maker users will use only the basic user interface features described in this document.
The basic user interface provides enough features to allow a user to apply mashups to the pages they browse. The user will need to use more advanced features if they want to create new mashups or teach Mash Maker about the semantics of a page.
The heart of Mash Maker is the Mash Maker toolbar:
The toolbar contains the following components:
- Suggested Mashups: A list of mashups that Intel Mash Maker thinks you might find useful for the current page. You can toggle a mashup between being active and inactive by clicking on it. What happens to the page when a mashup is enabled depends on the particular mashup.
- Search Box: If the list of suggestions doesn't contain the mashup you want, you can type some keywords into the search box to search for a different one.
- Copy and Paste Buttons: These buttons are used for creating new mashups by combining existing pages. See the chapter or creating new mashups for more information on how these buttons work.
- Feedback: Click this button to send a message to the mash maker development team. You can either select from one of several standard messages, or type a custom message of your own.
- Extras: This button displays a drop down menu that can be used to access less commonly used features that are not featured directly on the toolbar
Mash Maker tries to suggest mashups that it thinks you will like, but it isn't always right. This is particularly true if the page you are looking at seems similar to another page for which very different mashups would be approriate, or if you are looking at content that not many other users have looked at before.
You can help Mash Maker give you better suggestions in the future by telling it which mashups were good suggestions and which ones were bad suggestions. Simply right click on the mashup button and tell Mash Maker what you think of the suggestion.
Mash Maker will also will also prioritize mashups that you have used in the past.
When a mashup is activated, it augments the page with additional content. The content is inserted directly into the page, alongside the information it is related to. The content is represented visually by a widget, which is a user interface element that represents a particular kind of data. A widget may allow it's data to be edited or otherwise manipulated. The screenshot below shows the affect of having three mashups applied to a collection of apartments. In this case, each of the mashups produc es data that is represented by a different kind of widget:
Each piece of inserted information contains a link to the data source that was merged with this page to create it. If you open the link then you will see where the additional information came from. For example, in the screenshot above, "phone" is a link to the page that contained the phone number, and "food nearby" is a link to a search on Yelp for food near that apartment.
For more information on user interface widgets, see the chapter on widgets.
You are likely to see the message below quite frequently:
In order for Mash Maker to apply mashups to a page, it is necessary for some user to teach Mash Maker about the meaning of the page. As Mash Maker develops and the community grows, we expect that Mash Maker will understand an increasingly large proportion of web sites and this message will become rarer.
You may also see this message sometimes:
This message usually means that your machine is not connected to the internet, however it may also mean that our server has gone down, or the Mash Maker plugin failed while processing the mashup database. If you see this message and you are sure you are connected to the internet then please tell us by posting in the Mash Maker Forums.
