Category: Tech In Life

Chrome has had a brilliant feature that, at various times, has been called “Add to Desktop”, “Add to Taskbar”, and probably other things. Basically, it lets you open up a URL in a separate window that looks like an app, and shows up as a separate app in Windows. Chrome keeps on changing the interface–and just now, when I looked, I couldn’t even find a way to create such a shortcut.

Thanks to Tyler Whitehurst on this thread, I found a solution that works for me–and I’m recording it here so that it’s easy for me to find, and perhaps helpful to someone else sometime.

– Right click on desktop > new > shortcut
– Set location of item to: “{Path to Chrome}” –app=”{URL}”

E.g., my shortcut path is:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –profile-directory=Default –app=”https://drive.google.com/”

You’re welcome.

 

 

If you don’t know me, my career has been in computer software. I started programming in my pre-teens, took a college programming class at 13, binary-edited executables in DOS for fun, etc.

I think I’m becoming a Luddite.

The cloud is great. Keep all your documents, all your photos, all your data on the cloud. Access it from anywhere. And don’t even worry about what you own–stream video from Netflix or Amazon, music from Spotify or its competitors, and gain access to the world’s library of media!

But you want to put your own music on the cloud? Woe to thee, for thou hast entered The Dead Zone! Amazon used to run a music locker. As did the “legitimate” side of that pirate site whose name I can’t remember. As did a number of others–most of which have folded. Google Music offers some storage, but if you want to set it up on all your family’s devices…woe to thee, for darkness, despair, and error messages await!

All of this is a long path to saying–doubleTwist’s CloudPlayer app is wonderful, a secret I discovered after spending far too many hours trying to solve a simple problem. Basically: put your MP3s in the cloud. Probably on a Google Drive account that you set up on all of the devices that your family uses. And then, install CloudPlayer, and point it to them. It will take a bit of time, but it will index your files, let you view them by album, artist, and all the other usual attributes (even storage location), show you album covers…and let you play them. Simply. Just like any music player. From anywhere with an Internet connection. Exactly as easy to set up and use as a cloud-music solution should be. The link above is to the ad-supported version–but buy the Pro version. They deserve some money for building this.

If you have other great solutions to this problem, I’d be glad to hear about them. I’m unlikely to use them, though, if they involve installing a server on my laptop or setting up a Raspberry Pi or a Linux box somewhere on my home network–or even renting a virtual server to install my personal media server.