I've recently been working on an app which wants to interact with the user's
browser. On my 'native' platform, Mac, I've done two things which work well;
now I'm trying to work out how to achieve corresponding effects on Windows.
Firstly, I've defined a custom protocol type, eg "ben:" instead of "ftp:",
"mailto:";, etc. Once the user's configured their system to register my app as
the handler for the protocol "ben:", clicking on a link in a web page invokes
my app, which is sent an AppleEvent from which it can read the full URL. (And
this works regardless of browser - ie the mapping of protocol to app occurs at
a system level.)
On Windows, I've not found my way to this yet. The Windows 'Internet Options'
control panel seems to offer only the opportunity to set applications for six
particular protocols - ie you can choose the ftp app, the mail app, etc; when
I click on a link with my funny protocol it apparently decides to treat it as
an http: request anyway. I don't know whether this is always going to happen,
or whether if I could find a way to register a helper app for that protocol,
it would then treat it seriously. Is there some advanced way to edit the mapping?
And supposing I found this - or adopted something rarely used, eg the Internet
Options control panel allows you to set the handlers for 'internet call',
'calendar' and 'address book', so I could adopt one of these protocols and
make my app the handler for it - does anyone know how a Rev app would get sent
the URL? I know about the $ variables for reading start up parameters; but if
the app's already running, is there some message that it would be sent?
My second approach goes the other way; the user of my app can choose a menu
option which figures out what they want to do by looking at the page they're
currently viewing in a browser. Again, AppleScript is the key here; the
disadvantage is that the code needs tweaking for each browser, but nonetheless
it's not that hard for a Rev app to discover the URLs being viewed in most
browsers. Is there any way to do something like this on Windows?
TIA,
Ben Rubinstein | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cognitive Applications Ltd | Phone: +44 (0)1273-821600
http://www.cogapp.com | Fax : +44 (0)1273-728866
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