JobServe Labs - Articles in Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget

Sidebar Gadget v0.3 Released!

2009-10-07T11:19:14+01:00

Today sees the launch of the next enhancement to the Windows Sidebar Gadget: v0.3. To get hold of it, simply download it now!

The key enhancements are:

New ‘Distance’ selection dropdown on the settings dialog. Provide a hint to our search engine as to how far you want to travel out of the location you specify on a search.
New ‘Industry’ selection list. Now you can isolate your searches to one industry, or a combination of industries, within which our recruiters post jobs. So now, if you’re only looking for ‘Sales’ jobs, you can select that industry only and then use the skills search field to specify kind of sales job you want.
Added ‘Today Only’ option for job age. If you use our gadget frequently (and we know that a good number of you do!), then you can now restrict your results to only those jobs that have been posted today. An important thing to note with this feature is that at midnight UK time, all results will reset and your search will start to build up new results.
Added an “All Countries” selection in the country dropdown on the settings dialog.
Added ‘Email me this job’ feature. On our settings dialog you can now provide your email address (Note: we never give out your email address to anybody, so it’ll be in safe hands!). If you do this, then when you expand the full-job details, you’ll see a new link in addition to the Apply Now link. When you click on the ‘Email me this job’, we will send you the full-text of that job and a link to apply to it. You can only queue one email request per job in one 24 hour period; but there is no limit on the number of jobs you can receive by email.

Screenshots

The new settings dialog. Note the 3 new fields: Email, Distance and Industries.

New Job Details Page – when you’ve entered an email address on the settings page, run a new search and open up a job’s details. You will see the ‘Email me this job’ link. When you click on the link, its text will change to let you know whether or not the email has been sent:

If you’ve already been sent an email for this job within the last 24 hours, then the link will change to “Already Sent Today!”.

What about my Google Gadget?

Yes, if you’re a fan of the Google Job Search Gadget, you’ll be wanting to know when all these features, plus the rest of the configuration features that were added in V0.2, will be available. Rest assured, we are working on this as we speak and you can expect an updated version soon.

Anything else in the pipeline?

You bet! We are expanding the idea of “JobServe any place, anywhere” and there are some very exciting developments on the way very soon indeed. Keep coming back to the site, or subscribe to our Atom feed to keep yourself in the loop.

Sidebar Gadget v0.2 Released!

2009-07-24T14:23:28+01:00

We’ve updated our Windows Gadget – you can download the latest version here.

We’ve had a phenomenal response to the initial version of the Windows Sidebar Gadget, we’re seeing a lot of people from all over the world running searches and applying for jobs – so we’re really pleased that our hard work has been appreciated!

We’re really impressed, also, with the number of different countries that people are looking for jobs in, and we hope that those of you who experience low bandwidth to our servers are finding the response times for this search to be excellent.

As proof of our continued support of this alternative way in which you can access JobServe’s services, we’ve added a couple of new features that we hope will make the gadget easier for you to use. They mainly centre around the options dialog (screenshot taken from Windows 7 RC running on Virtual PC 2007):

Added Job Type selection, so you can now specify Permanent/Contract or both.
Added Job Age selection, so you can narrow down you searches only to jobs that have appeared in the last n days up to 7.
Added Results Per Page selection – now you can have as few as 5 jobs per page, up to a maximum of 100 jobs per page! (Note, this limit is imposed at the server-side, so any attempt to increase it, either by editing the .js files or by manually firing the query from the browser will unfortunately fail!).

You’ll also notice a Help icon on the main body of the gadget, this just offers a few pointers on how to search. Also, we have now introduced auto-update functionality – the next time we update the gadget, you’ll see a little yellow exclamation mark that you can click on, which will contain a link to download the latest version of the gadget.

The final big difference with this version of the gadget, is that it is now digitally signed by authenticode using the signtool.exe utility – and all of our future Windows Gadgets will be, too (therefore be wary of any gadgets that pretend to be JobServe gadgets). When you install the gadget now you should see ‘JobServe Ltd’ as the publisher:

You can download the new gadget from here. If you have the previous version installed, it won’t necessarily be overwritten – simply remove the old gadget from your sidebar/desktop, and then uninstall it from the Gadget gallery.

Notes to anybody who downloaded the gadget from the original article written about this gadget: The download links were changed in the old article to point to the new version at the same time that this article was published.

As always, please direct any of your comments to the feedback email at the bottom of this page!

Happy job hunting!

Search for jobs from your Windows Desktop!

2009-06-23T10:44:34+01:00

Update 7th October 2009 – The gadget has been updated to v0.3. All download links have been updated to the new version.

Following the release of the JobServe Labs website, we are planning numerous web apps, downloads and widgets which utilise web service technology.

The initial set of apps and features will be coded around a brand new RESTFul web service for our jobs designed to help you search, and apply for, your next job more quickly than ever before.

Our other initial Labs release, the OpenSearch Search Provider, uses this web service to provide results in the form of search suggestions in the web browser’s search box.

This desktop gadget, however, uses the service in it’s fullest form; allowing for country and location-specific job searching straight from your desktop.

Why use it?

When you’re looking for a job, you want to be able to type your search and get your results as quick as possible. Because this gadget runs discreetly on your desktop you can have it there all the time and just fire a search straight in whenever you feel like it. Also, if you’re on a lower bandwidth connection you’ll get a big performance benefit from this, as the only data downloaded from our servers is for the jobs that match the search that you put in.

So if you’re running Windows Vista or you’re lucky enough to have been playing with the Release Candidate of Windows 7, let’s get started!

Installation instructions

First, Download the gadget and, when prompted, select ‘Open’:

After that, you will be asked to confirm whether or wish to install the Desktop search Gadget, select ‘Install’:

Immediately after doing this, you should see the gadget appear somewhere on your desktop (this screenshot is taken from a Vista machine):

That’s it, you’re ready to go!

Configuring and executing your search

By default, the gadget is configured to search for jobs in Great Britain, Europe, the Middle East and Africa as a single area (in line with the interactive map that we use on the jobserve.com search results page). You can change this to any of the other major areas: USA, Canada and Australia & Asia, and indeed any individual country in the world (including the individual countries of the United Kingdom) by opening the settings panel. As you hover the mouse over the gadget, you will see three little icons appear on the top-right:

Click on the spanner, and you’ll see the settings dialog, on which you can select your preferred country:

For ease of access, our four main search areas are grouped together at the top of the list; and the rest of the individual countries are listed separately. You must select a country, otherwise the settings dialog will display a validation error.

Important note: Your country selection will be remembered until you remove the gadget from the sidebar. Upon removal from the sidebar the selection will be lost and you will need to reconfigure this if you add it back again at a later date. Note that if the sidebar is closed (either because you close it deliberately, or because you restart the machine) then the selection will be remembered.

Executing and browsing a Job search

The simplest way to search our jobs is simply to type the kind of job that you want into the ‘Skills’ text box (for example ‘c#’, ‘vb’, ‘sales’, or ‘cleaning’. Once you do that, you can hit enter to execute the search. The gadget will show a ‘Please wait’ message whilst connection to the web service is established and the search is executed. During this time, the search button is hidden.

Since I’m a C# developer, I’m going to search for C#; and my results look like this:

Each page of results is obtained via an Ajax call to a JSON-friendly method on our web service (which supports both XML and JSON request/responses). The size of the response varies, but 30-40k is a good average.

Each of the Jobs listed can be selected by clicking on it, once you do that, a second window will appear containing the job details:

No extra data is downloaded in order to display this job detail as the gadget pre-fetches it all when it gets the current page of results.

If you like the look of the job, then you can hit either of the ‘Apply for this job now’ links (there’s one at the top and bottom of the job detail), which will fire up your browser and take you to our Apply Online page.

As the UI suggests, the location box is the best place to put a specific location in which you are looking to work, although you can put the location in the skills box instead – the results should be near-identical.

More advanced Job searching

As with many general search engines, the JobServe search engine supports the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT; as well as quoted expressions (e.g. “visual basic” instead of simply visual basic). You can also use ‘+’ and ‘-‘ to specify that certain words must or must not exist.

So, for example, if I’m not interested in developing on Microsoft Office Sharepoint (MOSS), then I can change my query to ‘C# –MOSS –Sharepoint’ – and the results are as follows:

Equally, if I’m happy to develop in either C# or VB, but still not on MOSS, then I can change my query to ’c# or VB –MOSS –Sharepoint’ and I’ll get different results once more.

Stay tuned

Stay tuned, as we will be enhancing this Gadget very heavily over the coming months. You can always subscribe to our site Atom feed to stay up to date with all the latest developments on how JobServe is making it easier for you to find, and apply for, your next job. There’s also a feed dedicated to this particular project.