DeskBro





So What's It All About?

I found myself musing one day why it was that I had to minimize or reduce the size of my browser to get to a shortcut on my desktop (menu's are such a pain to use). Why couldn't I have a page running in the browser accessible by pressing the Home button which would let me run Notepad (or any other program) then return using the back button to the page I had been browsing. I also remember being hugely disappointed when IE4 had been launched as the possibility of being able to use web pages to change the desktop seemed to have enormous possibilities. As it turned out, you can't actually do very much to change the desktop with HTML except to change the background and add a few Internet links. Why bother to have a seperate user interface when a browser could replace the whole of the desktop! Of course if anyone can build a front end easily then it would reduce the OS to a collection of DLL's and the look and feel would never be the same again and out of control of the OS vendor. Well watch out because that's just what we're about to do!

First a little of the history of the evolution of DeskBro (you can skip this bit if you like). I had been toying with the concept of DeskBro for some months but had been unable to make it work. The browser is a secure environment and was never designed to run anything other than Web pages in a potentially insecure environment (The Internet). The first clue to how this natural security could be overcome was when I discovered that Internet Explorer has a very useful property in that it will ask the user whether a download should be saved to disk or run as a program. This might seem very annoying (Netscape doesn't do it) but it means that programs (such as Notepad) can be run from within the browser. This is potentially very useful. It is thus possible to create web pages with links to programs running on the local drive. The web pages don't need to be on the Internet and can reside on the local drive to be called up when the browser is launched or when the home button is selected. This opens up the possibility of writing web pages that can replace the existing desktop. These pages can be personalised to an individual or company or 'themed' for different users. So far so good.

However, it was less than perfect. The security dialogs couldn't be switched off making it a bit of a pain to use and certainly not an improvement on the existing desktop which was one of the design goals I had set for DeskBro. After a lot of head scratching, it became obvious that only ActiveX could solve the problem. An ActiveX control could be written using Visual Basic 5 that would sit invisibly in the web page taking requests for programs and running them by SHELLing out to them. This had the added advantage of allowing single clicks and no security dialogs were generated. The seeds were sown and after several weeks of work in my spare time, I had come up with a viable demonstration. So far so good. Then I discovered that it would only work in IE3 (my test browser) and refused to work with later browsers (I still do not know why - any ideas?). Once again, I was thwarted.

Then, at last, there was light at the end of the tunnel. It seems that IE4/5 (and to some degree IE3) supports a frame that gives the browser a window on to the local hard drive through which it could see shortcuts. Eureka! It has several advantages. Gone is the need to use VBScript and ActiveX and there are no security dialogs generated (unless security is set to it's highest level). Regrettably, only double-click is supported (though Win 2000 and 98 support single-click) but I could live with that. Just a bit of HTML, some shortcuts and the creation of a few directories and a demo was working within a couple of hours.

But enough of the history. What you really want to know is what can YOU do with it? Go Back to the menu and read on.


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Written by Nick Cheesman. Last updated: 01/07/2000
Please eMail me at: njc1@netcomuk.co.uk