I know I said that the next Prism related post I would be doing was one on manually installing an addon, but it’s taking me more time to get to than I had hoped. However, I do have another use for Prism that I’d like to share right now. I’ve been using Prism as a tool for creating TV show specific browsers for video sites. Veoh specifically, but I’m pretty sure you can do this for other video sharing sites as well.

Basically what I’ve done is used Prism to create a new webapp that points to the search URL of Veoh with a single program as the search term. For instance, right now I’m following the anime Toradora.

To create the webapp, I’ve chosen to place a link on my desktop, used the search link above, and enabled the navigation keys for Prism:

Alt+Back Arrow = Back in History
Alt+Forward Arrow = Forward in History
Alt+Home = Home Page for webappX
etc.

Veoh Search Link:

http://www.veoh.com/search/videos/q/your+search+here

Prism automatically pulls the site’s favicon as the desktop icon (has anyone else experienced problems with Prism not correctly installing the icon from pre-bundled webapps?).

Other places where this could be useful (other than setting up your own custom television station on your desktop with play-on-demand access)? The instructors for the courses I’m taking right now at ECU via the web often put class lectures on both YouTube and ECU’s own servers (depending on the class and the web-savvy-ness of the instructor). This would be a perfect way to distribute these movies to students, simply by placing the right URL into Prism and bundling the webapp, you can create a feed specific video channel for student consumption.

Other thoughts on this process:

• The ability to uninstall webapps would be useful. Manual uninstalls, while not difficult, are a pain.
• An addon or webapp script for Prism to load into the sidebar with links or buttons corresponding to pre-configured feeds/pages to change the currently viewed page so that you can “change channels.”
• Along those same lines, an addon with FF3′s built-in feed reader which would load into the sidebar would be a nifty means of navigating a number of pre-configured links… yes that would be nifty indeed…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Prism, Veoh, XulApps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.