Having spent several months honing and polishing DeskBro, I couldn't help but feel disatisfied with it. It seemed a messy solution for such a simple concept which was to run programs from web pages within a browser. I also had great difficulty in persuading some versions of IE (notably 4 and 5) to download the ActiveX component. I was beginning to give up hope of ever finding a way to do it cleanly. However, just recently, I started playing with the web capabilities of Windows 98 and 2000 Pro. I found that it is possible to display web pages on the desktop using Windows 98. Right-Click on the desktop and follow the tab for web. The current home page can then be displayed but it covers the whole desktop. Windows 2000 goes one better and displays the web page but cleverly resizes it so as not to obscure the desktop shortcuts. You still cannot launch programs from the web page but it does allow web sites to be launched as well as local programs from a shortcut and it means that web pages containing company information or help pages can be integrated into the desktop. But it didn't seem to help. Then by chance I found an obscure reference to IFRAME in the IE5 setup. A quick experiment brought about a revelation because it is possible to run programs from within a browser with the following simple line of HTML:-
<IFRAME SRC="c:\dbrow\" width="100" height="300"></IFRAME>
This innocous bit of code will display a floating frame containing a list of .EXE's or shortcuts contained within the subdirectory specified as icons and it works in IE 3/4 and 5 (sorry Netscape users but it won't work for you)! It also greatly simplifies the code required and (best of all) does away with the need to use ActiveX! Sensational. Simply fill the subdirectory with shortcut (.lnk) files from your windows installation (search for *.lnk and copy NOT move them). Control Panel applets can be called using shortcuts (see above) and shortcut icons can be changed as usual (this must be done using Windows Explorer rather than from within DeskBro).
So what do you do to get it going? Create a new HTML document and insert the line of code above between the HTML tags. Create a subdirectory using the path supplied and copy your saved HTML document into it. Search your drive for some shortcuts (*.LNK) and then copy them to the new directory. DoubleClick on the document to launch IE to run it. Double clicking on the displayed icons will run the relevent program.
There are one or two things to note. The IFrame will provide a scroll bar if it isn't big enough. Icons are displayed downward rather than across. To have more than two frames, each will need a subdirectory containing shortcuts. Shortcuts can be created in Windows Explorer in the normal way. The DeskBro icon frame can contain links to programs, batch files or documents. There are no hint windows and each icon has to be double clicked (rather than the usual single click although 98/2000 users can set the desktop to respond to single clicks) to activate them. Right clicking on any of the icons in the frame will display the usual menu and right clicking on the frame will allow the icon size to be adjusted or sorted as usual (IE3 defaults to small icons rather annoyingly). You can set a particular page as a home page and put a shortcut to IE in your Startup folder so that it always starts with a particular page when the PC is booted. But you are not restricted to a single page as shortcuts to other pages can be stored and activated from the favourites menu or from links just as you would ordinary web pages. If you would like to see some demonstration files then drop me an eMail as usual. Spread the word.
I hope this has given a flavour of the possibilities that this throws up and I await any comments you may have at the address below. In the meantime, have fun!
I await the next evolution of the Windows desktop with interest as it is rumoured that Mr. Gates wants to add web-like functionality to the desktop. Wonder if he's read this yet!