IE9 Site Pinning

yow wazzup guyz its me, ron and welcome to the first episode of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Walkthrough

so today, we are going to focus on Site Pinning. yes you can actually pin websites.. this is one of IE9’s best feature. what i like about site pinning is that you don’t actually need to type the URL of the websites you always go to.

here is a short video of me demonstrating you guyz on how to pin websites.

what i just showed you is on how to pin sites using the user interface of IE9. but how about those programming geeks out there? Web developers actually can take advantage of using site pinning. pinned sites feature interface elements that can be unified with the actual website and overall appearance of the site. since IE9 is using the site-centric approach, Integration with Windows 7 enables new ways for people to experience developer websites using the latest Windows APIs to create all of the features that comes with site pinning like jump lists, icon overlays, and thumbnail preview controls. but we’re getting too general in here. i’m going to just specifically focus on site pinning, all other features mentioned will be discussed further with future episodes of IE9 Walkthrough.

so some of you may ask me, especially developers, “how do you programatically pin sites?” well, heres how, listen up:

you can test this specific functionality by having a button that calls a JavaScript function that will process everything for the site to be pinned. [Click here for sample website. Click the “Alternatively Add to Start Menu” label at the top-left of the website to pin the site to taskbar]

here is a sample code for the HTML:

<button onClick=”addSite();”> Pin Me To Taskbar </button>
<!–now this specific code just calls the function “addSite()” whenever the button is clicked. –>

here is a sample code for the addSite() function:

function addSite()
{
try {
window.external.msAddSiteMode();
}
catch (e) {
alert(“This feature is only available in Internet Explorer 9.”);
}
}

what does window.external.msAddSiteMode(); do? well, according to MSDN, “The msAddSiteMode method adds the current webpage to the Windows Start menu under All Programs and launches the webpage as a pinned site. This method must be invoked by a user action, such as clicking a button, and the user is given an opportunity to confirm the action.”

there, it’s that simple. after pinning your sites to the taskbar, there are numerous functionality that comes after you pin your sites. those functionalities and features will be demonstrated on the next episode. so stay tuned!

sources:
[MSDN]
[Windows Internet Explorer 9 Product Guide]

wanna learn more about Internet Explorer 9? [download IE9] now!

April 11, 2011 | Categories: Microsoft Student Partners | Tags: Hotmail, HTML, Internet Explorer 9, JavaScript, Microsoft, Taskbar, Uniform Resource Locator, Website | Leave a comment