Autistic Geek

Near-Sighted Biker Gets Closer Look At Sign – Watch more at break.com

A few years ago I worked in a tech support for an ISP. To assist our customers we used a web interface. Unfortunately the persons who developed this system weren’t working together as a team, so I had one IE window open to the scripted troubleshooting pages, another IE window for the case notes that had to be recorded so whoever got the call if the customer called back (Dial-up: adjust something, try to connect, fail, call back) would know what had been done, a window for the CMS (to record what had been done for the DSL Caller), another IE for looking up phone numbers local to the caller, another IE for checking user/pass against the webmail server if a caller could not get to their email/webmail…you get the point. I seem to recall having seven plus windows open all the time to do my job. To open them, employees were using links sent to them in an email when they started employment.

I didn’t like the disorganization, so I wrote a html file that contained links to all the things I needed and added javascript to provide things we didn’t have. Because I didn’t have to sort though my company email to get to the links email I did not need so many windows open at once. If I needed a tool that I didn’t have open I’d click in one of my links and a new window would appear with that tool. I also automated the “local dial-up access number lookup” tool by adding a form field that I could enter a 10 digit number into and javascript would divide it into the three strings that were submitted into the official interface.

Before long I started passing my html document via email to other employees, several of which ashed me to turn it into a program instead of a web page. I, at the time, did not have the resources to do so until someone showed me a HTA. An HTA codes just like an html file. If you added framesets you could get it to display the contents of a page on a server, that way it wasn’t necessary to redistribute the HTA every time you made a change to the code. I developed a version for another client of the call center after my position was exported and I was moved to that client. HTA made my job easier, it just had one flaw that kept me from going into the business of developing consolidated interfaces for call centers… It only works on Windows, and it only opened new window links using IE. Now I’ve discovered Mozilla Prism.

Prism differs from HTA mainly by asking for a URL when you create a Prism file. When that file is opened it, Prism displays the contents of the URL just like a browser without any menus or toolbars. The page itself takes up 100% of the windows real estate, and new window links open in a new Prism window (choosing between Prism and the default web browser appears to be in the works for a future release). But the best part is that Prism is available on more than one OS. Thats makes Prism a tool I plan to use in place of HTA from now on. To bad I no longer work in a call center, although I’m sure I find somewhere where this would be useful.

It appears I’m behind the times on this one because Google seems to have been using this or something similar to it to create Google Apps, which are a group of programs that take several of Google’s web based endeavors (Gmail, Google Talk, Google Reader) from the browser to your task-bar.