va1damar

I have a few ideas i'd like to put into practice concerning search management tools that work from a toolbar within the browser. The first step is creating a toolbar (a skeleton version of the google toolbar or the fiendish yahoo toolbar) that i can then add my own functionality to. Problem is i don't know how to go about that.

I should say i my programming expierence is mostly academic. I've produced a lot of code, but have rarely connected it to a user interface (beyond the command line and a few applets). So to code a toolbar do i need to target a single browser or is there a general api that would make the toolbar compatible with several different browsers? And what is that api? And where can i get some info on it?

It would be ideal to find a pre-existing toolbar that i could begin immediatly populating with my own features, but they seem scarce. The second best thing would be to get my hands on the code (preferably java or perl) for a working toolbar that i could deconstruct and extend.

At this point i'm willing to use any browsers/languages/etc that work. I just need to get oriented and figure out what steps to take. Any advice is very welcome.