Yo!

I wanted to get started on a little project for the ITs using a web based interface. I'm just wondering if it's possible to launch apps from a browser... Any ideas?

Not as it currently stands (at least, in the sense that you're asking.) This would be a fairly large security risk, of course!

However, if you're running a web server on the device itself, you could have it kick off apps in response to some requests. I can help out with some Python code if you like. The security ramifications for this sort of thing range from major to epic, though...

if you run nginx and php you can also launch application with php ...

I'm looking to solve something similar as my sales team just sold a 25 person sales force on doing a pilot program with the Nokia IT platform.

Naturally they asked to start with a ridiculously short time frame and re purposed content from a CD ROM application (that my team developed in flash). The program will need to support some interactive content and multiple videos.

The tests that we've done in Flash on the browser support a roughly "you tube" like data rate. the native media player is much better but doesn't support interactive content, to my knowledge.

I guess my options are, develop an app to launch videos from that can also display some "click-through" legal screens, or sell the client on you tube quality.

Thoughts???

chadvavra: mplayer can be configured to play in a specific, static, window. You could place controls around that pretty easily. Do it in Python, and you could prototype it in a day or two.

MPlayer is a bit slow to start, but supports very high quality video.

i wanted to know if the nokia tablets can use the web based apps that are used on the ipod touch

seeing that the apps only use the web browser.

Good grief. Loud, bright, and written with excellent grammar. A triple-threat post.

Yep.

jacexxx: please refrain from big red text in the future --- you're not making the hangover or the jet lag any easier.

Not usually: iPhone/iPod Touch webapps rely on some special Apple browser magic. However, most iPhone web based apps are based on versions that run in Firefox, which run just fine on the N800 with OS2008.

Some of them work fairly well from what I've tested. Then again, the general philosophy is that you don't need to use separate reduced down versions of services when you can just as well use "the real thing".

I have been thinking about going this route, but instead of a web-server I thought about a custom json-rpc or xml-rpc server written in Python with the web page containing the Javascript client application being served as a local file.

Does this make sense? Basically, the rpc server is there as a proxy to provide local device services to the Javascript application.

If the rpc server validates that the only requests that it sees come from localhost and that the requesting page provides some sort of signature/authentication then how would I stand on security?