Gadgetopia

onfocus.com : snapGallery: This little gem was written by Paul Bausch — author of Amazon Hacks — and it demonstrates two things I’ve believed in for a long time: (1) the underestimated power of Windows scripting (the only people fully exploiting this are virus writers), and (2) the publishing model of using client side software to generate HTML and push it to a server (a la Radio).

“snapGallery is a fast, easy way to create a quick web gallery of pictures. After you select a folder on your machine that contains images (.jpg files), this script generates a series of web pages to display them. By editing a few lines in the script, you can even customize the font, page colors, and add a link to your home page. When the pages are finished you can transfer the folder contents to your server and share your pictures with the world!”

This is an awfully well-written script which uses Internet Explorer for the user interface, interacts with shell windows, etc. A lot of these things obviate the need for Microsoft’s equally under-utilized HTML Applications (with which I wrote Fleming years ago).

If you write a lot of one-off VB utility apps, reverse-engineering snapGallery would be well-worth your time.