Helper apps (was Re: EduTainment Titles)

Richmond Mathewson richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Thu Jun 25 16:27:11 EDT 2009


I suppose expecting a revlet to act like a sniffer dog and detect an 
end-user's web-browser (OS, version number, . . . . ),
an end-user's preferences for that browser, and attempt to modify them 
is too much to hope for for quite a while.

What would happen, then, if the end-user did not have the helper app the 
revlet programmer wished to use on their
computer, would the revlet "reach out" to the relevant website and start 
downloading the appropriate version for
the end-user's OS?

If for no other very good reason I can see the main objection to this 
being that I for one wouldn't really want all sorts
of revlets (as well as other plug-in stuff from other RADs) merrily 
playing pat-ball with my helper app settings and
stuffing my hard disks, willy-nilly, with all sorts of "helper apps" 
that might, in the long term, not be of much help at all
(except for the nonce) and make my system grind to a halt because the 
hard disks don't have enough swap space
left to function properly. It all seems, oddly enough, to open the way 
to nasty characters using revlets as virus-delivery
devices.

If a revlet in my browser pops up a dialog window that says "Permit 
download of Fastplay", my first inclination (being
fairly naive) is to assume that because it comes from Runtime Revolution 
it is OK; but, of course it doesn't come
from RR, it comes from a programmer who owns (or has got his/her sweaty 
paws on a pirate copy) RR, and may be
up to nothing very good at all.

Sorry if this all seems very poisonous and negative, but  . . .

Richard Gaskin wrote:
> Sivakatirswami wrote:
>
>> Richard Gaskin wrote:
>>> snip
>> Agree, an unhobbled option would be very useful.
>>
>> I've also proposed in the past that this helper application/Player, 
>> just like iTunes only comes from Apple, (Real Player from Real, Flash 
>> from Adobe etc.) be available from an "official" RunRev site.
>>
>> I can see security issues being of some concern, obviously, but if 
>> Apple and Adobe can do it, why not RunRev in Edinburgh?
>
> Does it require anything from them?
>
> In Firefox one can assign a default application to run downloaded 
> files of a given type.  IIRC such a setting is available in IE and 
> Safari as well.
>
> Providing instructions to the user is one way, but it would be ever so 
> cool to be able to have it "just work", as iTunes links do.
>
> There must be some way, even if it requires a one-time explicit 
> approval from the user, to allow an app to set this up for them.
>
> -- 
> snip
>




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