One of the best features of a recent Firefox browser is the Prism plugin.
Prism can be used stand-alone to create icons on your desktop which are just a favourite web page. That page opens almost as if it were an application.
The Firefox plugin for Prism adds a menu item to Firefox so that any useful page can be saved to your desktop as a Prism quasi-application.
But this has limitations. Take
Qtask.com for instance.
Back when I was doing UI's for Win32, I learned to set my Windows application default for backgrounds to non-white: I use a mossy-kind of olive drab. This color shows up in the background of any application which neglects to offer a default background or a background choice. The qtask.com web site is like that, so I use a user script in my Opera browser and a GreaseMonkey script in Firefox to flip that background to a pleasant "linen" color with
document.body.style.backgroundColor = "linen";
Easy.
When the web page is "sent" to the desktop, the user script option is lost: Prism's virtue is in being a minimalist browser - more a vassel or varlet than a butler or person-Friday.
But even if you could still run your own script to set a desktop web page to your own liking, the end result is not a home but a midden: desktop clutter and a hades of folders within folders.
This is what brings me to evolving Aule: the changes are to what is to count as my entry point, my aule, or your portal or her mashup.
Services purporting to offer home web pages seem to always fall short here: Yahoo's
My Yahoo is one of the worst.
A bit of client-side persistent data is likely as not also not the answer: I want my "home page" to be available from my travelling netbook, my mobile and my sedentary PC.
So what would a browser of prospective entry points - aules - be like?
It would know how to preserve my preferred entry points and my privacy - as any private entry to a home should do.
My first set starts with the coming release from beta of Tcl 8.6 and TclOO for Tcl/Tk. I have started by revising the link to a
Tcl aule at logiquewerks.com.
Over the coming days and weeks the aules for Tcl, Ruby, remote astronomy, Fredericton, poets and such will offer a default HTML entry, a scripted entry and three Curl options - one being a browser widget on Windows IE, one a desktop app and one as a Curl applet in most any browser on most any platform.
There are a few
Curl open-source projects that will facilitate building a web page that will help a user arrive at an entry point other than a browser "home page". Some will want a 3-D
aule with video and audio and some will want bread-crumbs that persist and some will want side-bars and gadgets.
In some ways this is also where IE 9 on Vista and Win7 is headed - but that is no help when I head out the door with my linux netbook or just my iTouch.
And in time it should lead to the demise of this blog as it, too, is in the wrong place and in the wrong format and does not show me what I need to know (a comment has arrived or a link has gone stale.)
My "home page" should be my entry point - simple, clear, visible and on my path. And maybe more cluttered on a Saturday morning but elegant before midnight. This is do-able.
