Glorified Greasemonkey-esqe applications with AIR

For the last couple of days I have been monkeying around with the HTML control in AIR. One aspect that fascinated me was the ability of AIR to execute arbitrary javascripts to manipulate the DOM of the loaded document. So I wrote this proof of concept application which I LOVE. I use Yahoo news for all my news needs (well that and BBC), but yahoo is too branded and has way too many ads for me. So I wrote this application that lets me browse yahoo news but strips the branding and the ads.

The left column of the application is fed via yahoo rss feeds. When the list item is clicked, the html control loads the link specified and then executes some dom scripts that looks for certain divs and removes them. I also had to change the content’s css style to allow it to float left.

Cool. My news browsing experience has just gotten a lot better 🙂

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur