You never know

I think this one would need a synopsis before the real story because some of you might just be interested in the functionality and not how it works.

So, Prism is a Firefox extension that allows you to make a web application (gmail, gdocs, etc) behave as a desktop app. Essentially it fakes a desktop application that can browse only what you configure it to do. The ‘faking’ app won’t have usual browser controls like back/forward button, address bar, etc….but then thats the idea right from the beginning to make an application and not ‘yet-another-browser-instance’. It would also install shorcuts to invoke ‘the faking app’, so that you can feel right-at-home with our start menu full of your ‘desktop’-apps. BTW, behind the scenes there would actually be an (another–not the one you are using for browsing) instance of firefox which would be running. Although, this instance is just firefox due to its name, it doesn’t share your user profile and hence the cookies, bookmarks, extensions etc are also not shared.

If you are the not-interested-to-know-details type you can essentially stop here.

To give a grounds up, firefox binary knows how to browse and its UI layer is essentially handled by XULRunner. The whole of firefox UI are essentially a bunch of XUL scripts. BTW, there is a reason I said essentially. XULRunner is used by quite a few application — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner#Uses, but firefox doesn’t use it the same way as all the others do. Firefox, has a copy of XULRunner engine and hence is usually not same as the-xulrunner. With Firefox 3 firefox.exe is now supporting any xulrunner app (configuration), and thats the power Prism is exploiting.

When we say that Prism is creating an app, it essentially writes a small configuration in user’s directory and the shorcuts to the app call firefox.exe with proper command line argument referencing the custom script.

I might have mis-quoted a few facts above and comments are welcome. BTW, further (more interesting) reading can be done here and here.

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Hmm…the title is basically a misnomer. This post is not about putting one pic in the post. I imagine the whole gallery should be available in the post. Frankly, even I am not sure how the output would be looking in the end.

BTW, the tool that I would be exploiting to do this is SimpleViewer. Its a flash based viewer which keeps info about the pictures in xml files. It also maintains thumbnail version of the pics. The output is (should be…I am yet to see it running) pretty professional. Check out some screenshots here. Live demo can be seen here, here and here.

Actually I had hit upon this software about a year back as well. But as I had mentioned SimpleViewer requires a couple of xml files which are usuallly generated by other softwares. There are loads of them. You can find links to a few of here. I wasn’t interested at all in the desktop solutions at that time. This time around I found WP-SimpleViewer plugin for WordPress. That is when I figured that SimpleViewer needs a shot this time.

OK enough of talk. Lets see how my sample gallery ‘ding’ looks with SimpleViewer: