I want to make a Desktop overlay application that is always on top of the desktop for windows. Like Wallpaper engine or Rainmeter for example . I want to go for minimal resource use. I have tried using WPF .Net but i got the limitation of not being able to bypass the show desktop shortcut (WINDOWS+D). I need something that will not be minimized when this shortcut gets used.
I'm willing to look into any coding language or framework. I just need a little push down the right path!
Thank you in advance
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I have to develop a browser based game with WebGL (for cross-platform support) using Unity that allows people with severe disabilities to take full control of their experience. This also includes opening and closing the application on their own. Opening the browser and game is pretty straightforward since these people can simply open them using a program provided by another company (like Tobii), but now I am facing an issue when trying to close the window again, since there doesn't seem to be a way to achieve this from within the browser/game.
My question is, is there a way to close the browser with JavaScript or maybe even in Unity itself? Or should I look towards creating an application outside of the browser with something like Java (for cross-platform support) that manages the browser window?
I already looked into ways of doing it via JavaScript or even from within unity, but I simply couldn't find a solution. I tried using JavaScript's windows.close() function, but that only works on windows opened from within JavaScript itself by the looks of it. Looking at a stand-alone application then leaves the question of how to detect an exit request from the user when they are done playing the game.
What I am looking for is a way for them to select an 'exit' button within the game which then closes the browser, so they can return to their assistance program, without the help from another person.
Currently, the user is only able to make use of a single button and can't control mouse or cursor themselves, meaning that they can't close the browser on their own.
tl;dr how can I close a browser window using an exit button in a WebGL Unity game for a person who isn't able to themselves due to a handicap?
Pretty sure you can't
And that goes back to window.close only working on windows opened with JS. Originally it could close any window, but people started abusing that fact (think about things like the self-retweeting tweet, except it also closes your browser tab!)
So the restriction got added.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I'm trying to create an (ideally) all-in-one cross platform tile based map/sprite/image editor for a game engine, since the current official one is Windows only and doesn't play nicely with WINE/Mono. Instead of building one from scratch, I figured it might be easier to create an extension for Visual Studio Code, but side panes don't seem to be interactive, and I'm having trouble getting it to open an electron window.
Is this possible, or should I just build it from scratch with electron?
That won't work. Visual Studio Code is a code editor, which supports extensions that can either add functionality to the IDE itself or provide HTML content to show in an own pane. This is not enough (and not made) for a full featured editor-in-editor scenario (interaction is limited).
I've built an extension which has a graphical view of a graph (see the last image) using D3.js, with limited interaction capabilities (you can select/drag a node and pan/zoom with the mouse).
Better is probably to go level down and start with Electron (on which vscode is based). This would allow you to write any desktop application that can be written in HTML/JS.
I have the mobile javaMe application that has been working on Nokia Phones. However, now I'm porting it to Samsung 5611, and I've faced with such a problem: no command is assigned on the central soft button, all of them are contained in the right-button menu. When the same midlet was launched on Nokia 3110c, one command was placed on central button, other ones (if >=2) were grouped into the options menu.
I tried Item.setDefaultCommand (no effect) and Display.getInstance().setThirdSoftButton(true) (such method not supported in SDK 3.4). Also I tried to change the type of one command to Ok or Screen, and change the priority, everything is without success.
Thanks in advance. Any idea will be helpful.
Sadly there's no way for the developer to decide exactly on which softbuttons the commands belong. It is the individual device that decides. Some devices has two softbuttons, and some has three.
You can fiddle a bit with priorities, but you still can't force commands to specific softbuttons.
That's high-level GUI (Form) for you.
If you want to have control of such things, you need to go with low-level GUI (Canvas / GameCanvas). Nowadays there are several APIs you can use to create Form-like low-level GUI. Check out LWUIT for example, which I imagine makes it easy for you to port your high-level code into low-level.
But even when using low-level coding, you have to be aware of different devices having different keycodes for the softbuttons.
I did search on web but did not find a good solution.
Here, full screen means that the title bar is hidden.
If you use cygwin in Windows, this is the mode when you press ALT+F11.
The typical Alt+F11 (or Shift+Alt+Enter as used in VS) full screen mode is not supported by PowerShell ISE. Feel free to suggest this on the Microsoft Connect site. If you do, post the URL back here. I'll vote on it.
My wife complains that I have too many icons on the Windows XP-Pro desktop.
I like to be able to quickly drop a file onto the icon for application I want to have open it. And I like to follow a link to open often-used deeply nested folders rather than navigate there. Thus, I have over 100 icons on the desktop.
(We share the same user account because we switch back and forth so often and because we both need to access the same e-mail, so separate accounts isn't the answer.)
I'd like to write a program which would have similar functionality to the Windows desktop. Then I could open that window to do the drag and drop work, but, when minimized, would leave the desktop display sparsely populated for my wife. As an added bonus, I could implement better organization of the icons than the desktop allows.
This is similar to what an Explorer window does, with the key exception that the desktop allows you to do some arrangement of icons. (For instance, program icons on the left (with the most used ones near the top), folders at the top, data files on the right.)
How do I go about getting an icon to display in a Windows Form (or on an appropriate control on the form)? (For instance, if I drop in a link to Notepad or a link to a file folder.)
How do I take the same action that the desktop does if the icon is double clicked? (For instance, if a link to a folder is double clicked.)
How do I take the same action that the desktop does if the icon has something dragged onto it? (For instance, a text file is dragged onto the Notepad icon.)
I'm using Visual Studio and C#.NET for programming.
I know how to do basic drag and drop.
I do not know:
A. what controls to use on the form to display the icons
B. how to find the icon
C. what commands are built by the desktop under various situations (so I can emulate the functionality)
I apologize that this is a multi-part question, but it was hard to break apart without explaining the whole story again.
This is a big question, but I'll give you some quick thoughts to get things moving in the right direction. WinForms exposes the functionality needed to make this happen, it's just a matter of wiring everything up the way you want it.
The key piece that you will want to look into is Drag/Drop, which is very well supported by WinForms. If you implement your icons as ImageBoxes you can set the AllowDrop property on the program icons and then handle the DragDrop event and have it call an overload of System.Diagnostics.Process() to start the application with the dropped filename as an argument.
As far as finding icons, most programs have their icon included as a resource in their .EXE file or in a related .DLL.
Regarding question C, the underlying question is what behaviors of the desktop would you like to have in your program? Explorer.exe is a massive application that does far more than what you need or what you will need or want to implement. Once you decide what functionality you want, play around with the IntelliSense list of events for the form and imagebox controls. You'll find that a lot of behavior is given to you for free in the Windows common controls, and additional behavior is fairly easy to add by handling the appropriate events.
Why dont you just use a Virtual Desktop??
Try http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/
You will skip a lot of coding.
Right from their page:
"VirtuaWin is a virtual desktop manager for the Windows operating system (Win9x/ME/NT/Win2K/XP/Win2003/Vista). A virtual desktop manager lets you organize applications over several virtual desktops (also called 'workspaces'). Virtual desktops are very common in Unix/Linux, and once you get accustomed to using them, they become an essential part of a productive workflow."