What a truly marvellous sounding thing, I've had a scan thro' the webpages for it and the linkability features are impressive, makes me wish I still had the skies to make use of such a thing!

And it seems Guide can be invoked to go to a position from external software?

Thing I've always wanted is a plugin for the Mozilla family of browsers that parses RA and Dec data, whether highlighted or from the clipboard after being copied, or whatever, that launches Guide at that position.

A kind of "linkification" plugin, but for coords (for those who don't know it, linkification is a mozilla plug in where you highlight urls quoted as text only, which can happen in websearches of articles and sometimes when people simply don't make a link live in email list archives or wherever, and right click gives an "open selected link" option, which duly does so when selected).

One of the biggest problems is the lack of standard for RA and Dec notation, but it'd be nice sometime to see something mentioned on a list, or in an ATEL, or wherever, and just get the quoted coords highlighted, even if over two lines, and be there in Guide, just like that. And Mozilla suite stuff, firefox or whatever, allows such things via its plugins.

The converse, Guide to web from coord/chart position, is easy enough, thanks to a feature Bill added to more info pages yonks ago.

I saw one plugin once for parsing co-ords from GCN GRB alerts but it was dedicated to their rigid format, and actually only searched their archives if I remember rightly. One plugin per source ain't much use.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6427

Cheers

John