I have a passion for free stuff and shareware, as you may have noticed. The reason for this is that while a significant percentage of free stuff is poor or even downright crummy, I contend that commercial products suffer from more-or-less the same ratio of dreck to good stuff.
There’s also a lot of novelty and creativity in the shareware and freeware world, as the thinking behind the products is unconstrained by commercial considerations.
Anyway, in this newsletter, we’ll look at a set of free Java applets called Heat-On Java Pack 1 (http://www.heat-on.com/javapack1/) from Jeff Heaton of Heat-On Software (http://www.jeffheaton.com/).
This collection consists of three simple but handy applets: the slightly useful HotScroll that presents a scrolling text bar with either a black or an animated background; the more useful HotButton that creates a button bar labeled with text or images and linked to URLs or bookmarks; and the very useful HotPassword that protects a link by requiring a password to gain access.
HotPassword is a neat idea. To create a HotPassword applet you use a utility (provided with the pack) to encrypt the target URL and associated password in the applet and another utility (also provided) to generate the APPLET command. This applet is only useful for nonobvious URLs -- for example, where the URL is a call to a Web app.
Indeed, a little judicious engineering and HotPassword applets could be generated on the fly to reference dynamic URLs that are session-related.
