Custom Mac-side Applications

After looking at how the dock applications work for windows application in 3094, it seems like there are mini-applications on the Mac side that send a call to a windows-side proxy application to launch the application in the guest OS.

Some playing around confirmed that we could change the launched application this way, but there seems to be no way to pass parameters. I was looking at this hack since I wanted to be able to create a program on the Mac side that I could associate with say MSWord docs and then tell Word on the other side to open the file. But without a way to pass parameters to the launching application on the Windows side I can't see a good way to do this.

Anyone else figure this out?

Parallels team, care to drop us a few hints regarding the API?

Cheers!

 

Im playing with that right now as we speak, trying to figure out the same thing... I want to be able to use windows shortcuts to folders etc. I have a lot of shortcuts to mapped network drives to obscure folders that I don't ejoy having to go find manually every time (probably 10-15 folders deep.)

 

This might work for you. Simply create windows shortcuts (.lnk files)

You can map the parameter "App Path" in the AppParams.pva file to that shortcut (this can contain spaces, as I just tested.) For now I think will be my solution... I will probably just keep a c:\shortcuts folder for this purpose and map them to the .app files on the OS X side. This way I can index whatever I want into quicksilver! No more windows task bar at all! how sweet it is.

The main problem I see with this though, is that if you replace the .icns file it does not appear to make a difference in the application switcher (cmd-tab.) This kind of sucks... I was hoping to replace this file for all of the .app helpers so that I didn't have to see some ugly scaled windows icons.

If you figure out how that works, let me know in this thread!

EDIT

Interesting... My tests for the shortcut were a duplicate of Windows Explorer.app. I called this Shortcut.app. When I use it, it correctly launches the .lnk file I wanted, but in the Application Switcher (cmd-tab) it lists the applications name that is running (Windows Explorer,) however the dock icon that is open is labeled "Shortcut"

 

You can do all kinds of stuff, but once you start using shortcuts you do run into many problems. For example, if you take a firefox.app and duplicate it. Rename to ffx.app. Edit the Info.plst file for the CFBundleName key to whatever you want. This name correctly appears in the cmt-tab switcher as well as the dock... This is cool.

However, if you change the AppPath to a shortcut to firefox, two items show up in the cmd-tab application switcher and the dock. It creates one icon for the shortcut (named ffx,) this happens immediately (presumably through their AppHelper daemon?) The problem is that now, that runs a shortcuts in windows, which then launches an application, making "firefox.exe" also appear in the cmt-tab application switcher and dock.

You can use either one to show/hide/quit the application... but if you quit one of them, the other still exists! This puts a big damper on using shortcuts

 

Lacking the parameter passing, I was thinking I would just build a proxy app on both sides of the OS-OS line, and use a mailbox file on a known good shared folder location to pass the info about what application to launch. On the Mac side an application that could associate itself with Word would get launched whenever a word file needed to be open and that would just write to the textfile malbox and indicate the name of the file name and the application type and then launch the proxy on the windows side. On the Windows side a application that takes no parameters would always check the mailbox to see what to launch and then launch it.

This should work fine, but I figured it would take me about a half day to do it and by the time I did the folks at Parallels would come back and tell us how to pass parameters Think I'll give them a day or two...