A do-anything firefox toolbar

We have a course called "Software Lab" at IITB. The agenda of this course is - one programming language every week, with a side effect - you fall in love with linux and everything that is free and open source. As a part of the course, we have to contribute something to the open source community. So, I, along with Sumair and Sree developed "Run-a-prog", a do-anything toolbar for firefox. Screenshot

Run-a-prog allows you to run ANY program on the text selected on a webpage. For example, if you have a text2speech program, you can add it to the toolbar and make it read out the text you selected on the page at the click of a button. You can write your own programs using any programming language of your choice and add it to the toolbar, and run it on selected text. All your program has to do is take a file name as a command line argument. Besides this, there are a few other useful features as well ;)



Run-a-prog has been tested on Fedora Core, Ubuntu and Windows XP and works fine with Firefox 2.0 and 3.0. To install Run-a-prog, download our cross platform installer and open it with firefox. Comments and suggestions are welcome :)

I have published the project on Mozdev.org, and can be accessed at http://runaprog.mozdev.org

Here is a presentation which gives an overview of the functionality and design. The source code and the documentation is available here.