We are trying to distribute a basic HTML file with some links to a PDF document in a USB drive for advertising purposes. The idea is that an autorun opens up this HTML in the default browser. However, this might not be a good idea since it would look very amateur-ish and we will have to rely on the default browser's technology (which unfortunately has a good chance on being IE6/7!)
We've explored a few alternatives, but we can't find one that really fits what we are trying to achieve:
Mozilla Prism
Altough it seems like it's designed with offline web apps in mind, the executable creates files in the user's AppData directory and it's hard to configure the default paths. Also, Firefox doesn't have a default PDF viewer, so we will have to depend on the user's default PDF viewer (which might be Adobe Reader)
Mozilla Chromeless
Since Prism is inactive, the idea is still developing with Chromeless, which allows the developer to create the browser interface with basic HTML/JS/CSS. The main issue here is that somehow the build isn't loading HTML, all that's showing is a gray iframe. I'm not sure if it's just me, because there's nothing on the issues page.
Portable App
We could throw in the portable version of Firefox or Chrome and customize the XUL for Firefox or open Chrome in app mode.
Firefox's advantage is that it kind of supports relative paths (resource://), but it doesn't have a built-in PDF viewer. Chrome has a very good and lightweight PDF viewer and the built-in app mode is a very useful feature for us, but I can't find how to open a local path without the usual absolute path (file:///C:/) since we don't know what's the drive's letter.
Has anyone figure out how to handle this kind of issues? Thanks.
This has been asked three years ago, but it's unanswered, listed high in Google, and I stumbled over the exact same problem and can imagine that many others that seek to ship portable web apps that can be run locally and with a minimum of dependencies will encounter this issue, too.
The solution I am now going with is the node-webkit.
You can treat it like a portable version of chrome, however it excepts a relative path to your app's entry point, is about 40 MB smaller, and much more customizable than the --app mode of chrome (which isn't customizable at all if I remember correctly).
Github & Download:
https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit#downloads
An extensive guide:
http://thejackalofjavascript.com/getting-started-with-node-webkit-apps/
My usage suggestion for Windows:
First create an app package as explained in the guide linked above
For the node-wekit to load with your app, you need to start it like this:
nw.exe app.package
Where nw.exe is in the root of the zipped folder you downloaded and app.package is a zip file (can have any name) that contains your app data and package.json.
To do this silently, you can use a BAT file containing the (amended) call above and a VBS file containing something like this:
CreateObject("Wscript.Shell").Run "cmd /c launchNW.bat", 0, true
launchNW.bat being the name of your BAT file. Now run the VBS file; a window containing your web app should pop up without the command window appearing with it.
Finish reading the linked guide to learn more about customization options to do things like hiding the browser UI etc.
Related
I'm trying to debug some JavaScript for a Rails project and its incredibly frustrating to go line by line when the source code is compressed in the Sources developer tab.
I know this compression is done by Chrome through the body variable. What I want to know is if there is any way to stop Chrome from compressing files in source view, i.e:
\application.js?body=1 --> \application.js
Thank you for your time.
Compression is being done by Rails. Disable it in your configuration:
# config/production.rb (or whatever environment you're in)
config.assets.compress = false
You might want to investigate a new feature in Chrome called Source Maps.
Source Maps allows Chrome to map the compressed source code it receives to the uncompressed original, which in turn means that you can debug the code, even though it's been compressed.
This feature should help you get around this kind of problem without having to change the compression settings on your server.
You can read more about it here: http://blog.mascaraengine.com/news/2012/4/16/sourcemap-support-in-chrome-greatly-improves-debugging.html
I believe this feature is still in test and not yet in the final release version of Chrome. I'm sure it will arrive in due course, but for the time being you may need to install the "Canary" version of Chrome, ie the pre-release version that includes all the forthcoming features that they're still working on.
I'm trying to get TypeScript source debugging working in Chrome, but I'm running into two specific and perhaps related problems.
The first is that the comment generated by the TypeScript/WebEssentials compiler that's supposed to identify the location of the source map file looks like this:
//sourceMappingUrl=MySourceFile.js.map
But Chrome won't read that file. It seems expect that the comment will look like this:
//# sourceMappingUrl=MySourceFile.js.map
If I manually change the comment to that, and refresh my page, then magically the references to all the .ts files show up as sources in the Chrome Developer Tools.
However, that leads to my second problem, as the files don't actually get loaded. The .ts source file that Chrome should be trying to download is http://localhost/MySourceFile.ts, but the one that it's actually trying to download is http://localhost/C:/source/web/MySourceFile.ts. That sort of makes sense, as the opening attributes of MySourceFile.js.map look like this:
{"version":3,"file":"tmp1523.tmp","sources":["C:/source/web/MySourceFile.ts"
But that obviously doesn't work with Chrome, as it interprets the source-map location to be entirely relative, and IIS (quite correctly) won't serve up any URL looking like http://localhost/C:/source/web/MySourceFile.ts.
So, with respect to these two problems, is it Chrome or the TypeScript source-map feature that's doing it wrong? And what's the recommended way of doing this?
I'm using Chrome 25.0.1323.1 dev-m, with TypeScript 0.8.1 and WebEssentials 1.8.5.
This is an issue with version 1.8.5 of Web Essentials (the version currently available from the Visual Studio Gallery). The latest nightly build (at time of writing http://madskristensen.net/custom/webessentials2012.vsix) fixes the problem and generates the map linkage correctly.
I am currently beginning a project where we want to build an Interactive Whiteboard (educational activities) and deploy via CD-ROM. I want to build the project in HTML5 for it's interactivity and then somehow compile it to both .exe. and .dmg so when the CD-ROM is inserted it autoplays the 'Game'.
How is this possible? Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
I already made a project using pure C (WinAPI) on github that can pack HTML files into single EXE using resources.
http://github.com/dns/WinAPI-Embed-Browser/releases
Use: res://programname.exe/test.html as path to access html files from your EXE file.
From here you also can hide the window border & just showing the content of your HTML app, or even running on fullscreen. This is very useful if you want to make interactive CD-ROM.
On Mac, you can use Delphi/Lazarus TWebBrowser control to load html files. However I don't know if mac program can access files from resource or not.
HTML 5 is a browser technology, so I think as long as the pc you are installing on has the latest browsers, installing your app should work fine.
Can you tell us why you want it as a CD-ROM based installation, where as you can easily host it online?
You may not need any .exe wrapping. Here is an approach.
Important: your autorun will be often disabled, [not so] quietly. Provide some instructions for running your application manually.
So:
Google for running a portable version of Firefox or Chrome from a CD. Have the browser prepared. Put it in a [sub]directory representing your CD.
Put your content there.
Create a .cmd file to invoke the browser with a command like,
FirefoxPortable.exe index.html
Create autorun.inf (details googlable) to call the above batch file.
Make a CD image from that directory. There are lots of CD burning applications that can do that.
Test.
Sometimes I need to write a small program just to represent some data in a chart, or similar stuff. I have been wanting to do this kind of things through the browser, with HTML5. I think it would be nice to use its canvas to create a nice UI for simple apps.
I have read some articles related to offline applications with HTML5, but they focus on downloading all the data you need and save it to the cache to use it offline later. You even need to set up an Apache server (or similar) to create your app.
I don't need my app to be online, just in my computer. I just want to create a simple application, nothing to do with internet at all.
How can I do this? Is it even possible or worthy? Is there any "Hello world!" tutorial about this around there?
Something like Mozilla Prism would be good for displaying the content as an application.
There's no need to have a web server like Apache for just displaying HTML5/Javascript in a browser. You can just have it all in a folder on your desktop and then load it in the browser with the file:// protocol.
For example file://C:/Documents and Settings/YourUser/Desktop/YourApp/index.html would open an HTML file in a folder called YourApp on your user's desktop.
If you ever find you need to read static HTML+Javascript files locally then I'd recommend using this python command in the console:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
It launches a simple HTTP server (who'd of guessed) that serves files from the current working directory. Effectively, it's the same as launching an apache webserver, putting some static assets in /var/www/... etc. etc.
You could also just browse to the assets at file:///some/folder; however, most browsers will prevent javascript from using AJAX when files are loaded in that way, which will manifest as a bunch of bugs when you go to load it.
Okay, so I'm a student programmer in my college's IT department, and I'm doing browser compatibility for a web form my boss wrote. I need the user to be able to open a local file from a shared drive with a single click.
The problem is that Firefox and Chrome don't allow that for security reasons. Thus, I'm trying to write a custom protocol of my own to open an address in Internet Explorer regardless of the browser being used.
Can anyone help me with this? I'd also be willing to try an alternative solution to the problem.
The below worked for me, is this what you mean?
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo]
#="URL: foo Protocol"
"URL Protocol"=""
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo\DefaultIcon]
#="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo\shell]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo\shell\open]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo\shell\open\command]
#="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe \"%1\""
Just to note, I'm running Win7Pro, so you may have to move around file path(s) to conform to your environment.
And if that doesn't work, create a proxy between the protocol and the browser, pass the argument(s) from foo:// to that, parse what's necessary, then hand it off to IE using start iexplorer.exe "args".
I'm unsure whether I understand your question, if it is how do I open local files using chrome/firefox, this is your anwser:
First a disclaimer, I have never done this and cannot vouch for the accuracy of my response
IE
Microsoft's security model is pretty fail so you can go right ahead and open these files
FireFox
Some quick googling found that Firefox can do this after either editing prefs.js as outlined here or installing an addon called LocalLink
Chrome
Practically impossible due to its security, until now when locallink was ported to chrome.