Website Launcher

After creating a small independent website server with my Raspberry Pi, I wanted to be able to open it very quickly on demand, without having to remember my public IP address, port number and file name. For a short time, I used a bookmark and while this worked, it proved cumbersome.

I set about creating this application so that I could at a single press, turn on my computer. All the application had to do was open up a predetermined file at a predetermined address. However, I wanted to make the application feel more like a button, like an Android widget, but inside the App Drawer.

Thus I played around with ways of having the application open invisibly, and self close if it was successful at connecting to the Raspberry Pi. At around the same time, our broadband provider was experiencing numerous issues. As this meant a constant changing of routers, this had the unfortunate side effect of changing the public IP address of my Raspberry Pi.

With that in mind, I added in a file into the application data that it would read on opening and use the included IP address as the target to open. Thus if the public IP address needed to be changed, I could simple modify a single .txt file with a file manager.

Although this application is smaller and has fewer features, it has become my favourite application. This combined with the Android Remote Desktop from Microsoft gives me access to my home computer from anywhere with an internet connection, and has proved invaluable on the various occasions.