Overview

This is a suite of applications and libraries for working with web shortcuts. Web shortcuts are the files that are created by various operating systems when you save a link to a website. These utilities support shortcuts for Windows, Linux, and Apple. Specifically, these are files with the following extensions: .url, .website, .desktop, .webloc.

Applications

• PC Application

  Allows you to launch shortcuts on PCs (installers available for Windows and Linux).

• Android App

  Allows you to launch and create shortcuts on Android devices.

Libraries

• Java library

  Provides classes/methods for reading and writing shortcuts.

• Perl Library

  Provides routines for reading and writing shortcuts.

• Shortcut Samples

  During development I collected shortcuts from various operating systems (both to study and to use for unit tests). I also manually created some examples for testing purposes. I made these available in their own repository with the hope that they will be useful to other developers.

Background

I have found myself using various operating systems over the years, and I have also increasingly used cloud file services. I sometimes work in one operating system, create a shortcut, put the shortcut on a cloud service, then try to open the shortcut in another operating system. This generally does not work. There are workarounds such as opening the shortcuts with a text editor and copying the URL, or using link services such as Delicious.

I decided to try and create a set of applications and libraries that would allow you to open any shortcut regardless of which operating system you are using. I don't find this subject particularly exciting, so I was initially hesitant to start a new project. However, I wanted to gain experience using various programming languages, installers, etc., and This project seemed ideal due to its small size.

There are a lot of improvements that could be made to these utilities. Unfortunately, this is a low priority for me, and I don't have specific plans to develop them any further. If you find the utilities useful and would like to see them improved, please let me know (I guess if you hate them you can let me know too).

See the To Do wiki page for a list of future improvements I would like to make.

Author

Andre Beckus (@beckus)