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Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

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gschoppe
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Joined: April 26th, 2009, 8:30 pm
Location: St Johnsbury, VT

Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by gschoppe »

MattKing, that is awesome!! that code should also work for the taskbar, with a different window handle...

all the listed .net commands just appear to be API commands with fancy aliases.

I did find out that it is possible to send commands to the taskbar (just the open windows part) using sendmessage, i just don't know the name windows uses.

I believe child windows can be enumerated my name, so finding that out wouldn't be hard if i could find out how exactly to do this enumeration.

then we'd have all the components necessary for a place-able start menu, capabilities to list items and icons in the taskbar and tray, the capability to list context menu items and associated commands, and bangs to activate all these things...

THIS IS PROGRESS!!!
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sgtevmckay

Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by sgtevmckay »

gschoppe wrote:THIS IS PROGRESS!!!
"He's insane, I tell ya, just gone over the coo-coo's nest" 8-)
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Samus Aran
Posts: 86
Joined: August 7th, 2009, 11:23 pm

Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by Samus Aran »

I'm afraid that's not "PROGRESS", but "SPARTA" :roll:
sgtevmckay

Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by sgtevmckay »

:twisted:
P2C
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Joined: November 13th, 2009, 10:22 pm
Location: near Würzburg, Germany

Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by P2C »

May 2010 is here. :p

Actually, when looking for a german tutorial of AutoIT, I found this post in a german forum.
http://autoit.de/index.php?page=Thread&postID=46884&highlight=laufende+Programme#post46884
As you see, the debug-log lists all running application of the user (take a look at the lines starting with Debug: Index:). Scrolling up to the post above, there's the code which was used for this log in a spoiler.

Actually, I tried this code with the newest AutoIT version, and I only got several error messages saying, that some variable doesn't exist. I'm a totally newbie to AutoIT, and this post is from 2008. Maybe there are some changes in AutoIT which cause this :?:

I know that AutoIT can write strings to a ini, but I'm not sure if we could even create a program that keeps checking the running programs and not only doing this when starting up.

But as we would have the full title of the window (and there's also an index, if that helps anything), wouldn't we be able to open, minizime and close it.

Maybe this helps?

But as I said above, I didn't got this working myself (though, the other user did) :(

Edit: It's working when using explorer.exe as a shell. Errors only occur with Litestep as shell.
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maminscris
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Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by maminscris »

wow in progress :shock:

last year i was speaking about an os, seems that will not be an os but a shell replacement

i do not know what I'm talking

good luck and tones of time with the work
Zero at programing, zero at writing codes, so far 2 at making images
But I'm good at copy/paste, and I not always like this
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P2C
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Joined: November 13th, 2009, 10:22 pm
Location: near Würzburg, Germany

Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by P2C »

I've made some progress, though not that much

So, here's a screenshot of that Rainmeter skin:



Problems:
-it doesn't update automatically (and I don't know how to do without updating the whole skin every 1 or 2 seconds which would cause a lot of CPU usage I guess)
-it currently displays only 11 tasks.
-if you're currently using a shell (like explorer.exe, litestep) there are some weird programs in the list (like xtaskbar for example). Without a shell, however I didn't notice anything ...
-Some programs are twice in there.
-It doesn't launch the program, YET. But I have an idea how to do this.

How it works:
there's a small .exe made in AutoIT that writes the tasks into a Variables.txt like this:

Code: Select all

[Variables]
Task1=Firefox
Task2=etc.
Task3=
The number of tasks is not limited here, so if there was 687 tasks, there would be Task687=

But the number of Meters in Rainmeter is limited, so I only made it to display 11.

I don't really know how to solve the problems. Especially with updating. I would need something like DynamicVariables, but not only working in combination with !RainmeterSetVariable.

Any ideas? :|
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Kingsmob77
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Joined: August 27th, 2010, 12:56 pm

Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by Kingsmob77 »

Hello everyone, I'm a long time lurker but recently registered for the board and wanted to share something. I'm not sure if this is still being worked on as I see the last post was in 2009 but if it is or anyone is interested, I have a link that may aid in the development of a Rainy task bar.

This is an article from the old Virtual Plastic site. It explains how to use a HTML COM object to retrieve and display task information to recreate the task bar in an HTML page. The idea was to use it with the active desktop.

I don't know if it would be useful for this project but you can read more about it here.

Download a zip file with a working example of an HTML task bar replacement.

Again don't know if this will be helpful but I thought it might be worth a shot.

Cheers,
Kingsmob77
Cheers,
Kingsmob77
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'Go then, there are other worlds than these'- Jake Chambers
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Chewtoy
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Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by Chewtoy »

For the life of me, I could not get that replacement to work one bit weather following the guidelines that came with it or venturing out on my own ideas of how to get it to work.
And as I didn't get it to work like it was supposed to, I much rather wonder how to get it to work with rainmeter.
I'm on XP, so it's from the intended era...
I don't think, therefore I'm not.
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Kingsmob77
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Re: Open Dev Thread for Task Bar Functionality..

Post by Kingsmob77 »

Chewtoy wrote:For the life of me, I could not get that replacement to work one bit...
I know that I had it running on XP at sometime in the past but off the top of my head don't remember how.

I'll play with it tonight and see if I can get it going again.

If not - eh, it was worth a shot. :-)
Cheers,
Kingsmob77
-----------------------------------
'Go then, there are other worlds than these'- Jake Chambers