I was just examining some files, and had to peek at one using a hex editor to find out something about it without using the program that created it. This is something that should be visible in the "Properties", or even the pop-up tooltip.

When the app vendor didn't provide such a thing, Perl would be an obvious choice for a little utility to pull out the "interesting" data from the file. Ordinarily we would make a command-line tool.

But, here's my idea: a Property Page framework that's either written entirly in Perl or embeds Perl for the file parsing work. If this module exists and takes care of doing the GUI shell integration, and all one has to do is the real work of determining and formatting the useful information, maybe we'd start using the concept more.

Has anyone done anything like this (yet)?

—John