LinkedIn and Windows Live are among the sites that have taken advantage of Jump Lists to enable themselves to function more like applications. With LinkedIn or Windows Live, users can click items in the Jump List to go directly to specific pages or functions within the site.
Customizing Jump Lists
Pinning Facebook to the Windows 7 task bar provides little more than a simple shortcut to the site, but LinkedIn and Windows Live deliver a more integrated experience resembling a locally installed software application like Outlook. Adding Jump List tasks to your site is relatively simple, so why not give your visitors a reason to pin your site to their task bar?
With IE 9 and Windows 7, the Jump List tasks link to static URLs that a user can click and access directly even when the pinned site itself is not open. You can include Jump List tasks for your site's most common features so that users can jump straight to those functions without having to open their browser and navigate to the appropriate page manually.
The linked tasks are stored as static URLs--paths that link directly to a specific site or function. You can define a maximum of five Jump List tasks using HTML metatags. The metatags, which define basic information about the site, are cached with the pinned site. Here's an example of how to define Jump List tasks for your Website, excerpted from a Microsoft document titled "Win7 Desktop Integration with IE9," by Israel Hilerio, Ph.D (the document itself is not available online, but the content and tips within it can be found online here):
content="name=Task 1;action-uri=http://host/Page1.html;icon-uri=http://host/icon1.ico"/>
content="name=Task 2;action-uri=http://microsoft.com/Page2.html;icon-uri=http://host/icon2.ico"/>
Hilerio explains that this code defines two tags: 'Task 1' and 'Task 2'. Selecting 'Task 1' will cause the software routine to display the Page1.html site, and selecting 'Task 2' will cause it to display Page2.html, which is an external site on the Microsoft.com domain. Each task will open within its own tab of the pinned-site browser instance. If the pinned site is not currently open, clicking one of these Jump List menu items will open a new browser instance.
Create Custom Jump List Categories
Your Website can also add Jump List categories that extend its functionality beyond the five Jump List tasks. The Jump List categories allow you to go directly to such destinations as files, documents, or URLs. You can use SiteMode APIs to create a custom Jump List category with links that are unique to each specific user, such as a personal profile page.
