deskCut
I'm big fan of phoenix... er...firebird... wait a minute...FireFox. I'm also really lazy when browsing. I like the IE thing where you can right-click and make a shortcut on the desktop pointing to the page you're on. Problem is:
- I run Linux at home and Windows at work...
- I don't know if it's even possible...
So I do some looking around and find the whole concept of mozilla extensions...
these are chunks of code (javascript and XUL) that add functionality to the Mozilla suite.
Since the entire user interface (all the menus and buttons and such) are defined in XML-ish files, you can modify chunks of it.
Then I find the IEView extension.
This adds an entry to the right-click menu to open the current page in Internet Explorer.
So I figure it can be done, at least in Windows.
Next up is the Linux thing... I run KDE and I know it uses the whole 'Desktop as a file folder' concept... Meaning the "desktop" is just a file folder that you can drop files, etc. in... After some poking around I find a spec for desktop-entries in general. KDE supports it as does GNOME...
So I figure it can be done in both Win and Linux.
Turns out, it was do-able.
Some stuff to check out if you're interested in extension development:
- A nice tutorial on Moz.org.
- Another nice tutorial from roachfiend.com
- A new tutorial focusing on the GNU/Linux side...
- Assorted references on xulplanet.
- Venkman: not Peter Venkman, but the Javascript debugger named after him.
