Controlling Netscape helper applications

[Alejandro Garza Gonzalez]

Re: How to shutdown unused apps after a certain amount of time...

I'd hate to sound like I have a religious thing for the Flute macro 
language for windows :) , but I do believe it could solve this problem...

Flute lets you detect what applications are open by checking if their 
icon or window is on-screen. If you want to, you could shutdown unused 
helper apps, depending on what you define 'unused' as...

* "User hasn't moved mouse after X seconds"
   Well then, just use the provided Flute script from the Web4Lib 
   reference center ( http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/faq.html )
   "Netscape Timeout for Windows", and modify it to close applications
   when the timeout hits.

* "Helper Application hasn't been active for X seconds"
  .. well, that's tougher, since you can't tell idle helper apps 
  from active ones; you can only sense what the user is doing, 
  input-wise. Hence, you can test the keyboard or mouse for action, but
  not what's happening to a particular app (it could be decompressing 
  data, for example, but you wouldn't know it; you would just have to 
  set a big-enough timeout to accomodate for those cases).

If you have a screenblanker than launches programs when its timeout hits, 
you could make it launch a Flute script that tells each helper app you 
know might have been started to close. I haven't found a shareware 
screenblanker that does this, however.

Where you can get Flute from and other detalils are in the above URL...
I hope that helps...

_Alejandro Garza
 agarza at campus.mty.itesm.mx
 http://www-cib.mty.itesm.mx/   
 ITESM University Library, Monterrey MEXICO

===================================================

On Wed, 1 May 1996, Walter Giesbrecht wrote:

> 
> We are about to set up a large number of public Windows-based workstations 
> with Netscape, primarily to allow access to our web-based catalogue, but 
> also to provide wider access to the Net within the library. All installations 
> will have a number of helper applications (Panorama, Adobe Acrobat, 
> telnet client) installed as well.
> 
> The question I have for you all is: how do we make sure that these 
> helpers are shut down when no longer being used? One can imagine the 
> effect on system resources of multiple copies of <pick your helper app> 
> all sitting in memory. Is there any way we can (reliably) force the 
> system to shut down all unused applications after a defined period of 
> time? One of our technicians thought he heard of a way to use the screen 
> saver to do this; do any of you know?
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Walter W. Giesbrecht               walterg at yorku.ca    
> York University Libraries 
> North York, Ontario, Canada             
> 
>