Local Application Link & Load

[meomizzle]

Hi Anthony, Loving Lab Dash, its a great tool, helps me feel more organized and is now my official home page whenever i boot up.

Hope you don't mind that I have created a stand-alone app, with the help of Codex, that creates 'labdash-links' which can be used to map applications installed on the users local machine - only I couldn't work out if this was possible natively. (This is the part when you tell me it is, and that I've wasted the last three days of my life 🥴)

Its not as polished as Lab Dash, and is my first real venture into coding and i have no doubt that i still have a lot to learn. Yet would you spare some of your time to take a look and provide me your thoughts and feedback please?

I have attached a brief which explains in a bit more detail what is does and how it does it, but it now means that I can drag/drop and click to open any .exe file that is installed on the machine, just the same as any other html link/shortcut displayed on the dash.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers
Meo

DEV_BRIEF.md

https://github.com/meomizzle/mizzle-labdash-launcher

[AnthonyGress]

Hi! Very cool, I love seeing people build things on top of what I built.

This is somewhat supported by lab dash already. Each app on your system has an option to assign a URL scheme to their app. So like mailto: opens your default mail app. Some applications assign their own and if you know their URI scheme or find it, you can access this natively.

An example is on Mac OS and iOS a couple apps I use are Apollo:// and UniFi-network://
Which opens the Apollo app and UniFi network app respectively.

You can also create your own URI schemes in windows with a little less work (if I'm understanding your code correctly)

Check out this link.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/80650/how-do-i-register-a-custom-url-protocol-in-windows

Then in lab dash all you have to do is add a shortcut with a found or created URI schemes for the app. So apollo:// as the "url" in lab dash.

All in all, very cool addition and glad it's working for you! Time spent coding is never time wasted IMO, keep it up!

[meomizzle]

Thanks Anthony, appreciate the feedback, I had a feeling there would be a way, and you are correct, my little 'helper' does create a custom url protocol for each app, just without messing in the registry, there's nothing quite like solving a problem that didn't really exist 🤣 I do still have a lot to learn.

I do have a couple of questions about Lab Bash, that I couldn't find any other posts about nor anything on the roadmap - It there a way to 'sort' the list of self-created pages? Also, the notes widget, could be possible to have the actual notes editable without needing to login?

Once again, thanks for your time and making tools such as this. 👍

Regards
Meo

[AnthonyGress]

The only way to "sort" your pages is by going into edit mode and dragging the items around. If you are feeling crazy you could edit the JSON file directly but I'd make a backup first.

Logging in to the notes widget is by design so that if you share this instance with others, they can read the notes only and not make any unauthorized changes. It's a mild inconvenience but is more secure for users who have more than 1 person accessing an instance of Lab Dash. Logging in once should keep you logged in for a few days at a time