is there any way to place a window behind the desktop icons or as the backgroud of the desktop?
For example I have a window and I want it to always in the back and below the destop icons.
No. Background is background, and is controlled by Windows itself, mostly through theme engine. You can put at best a slideshow - changing wallpaper roughly through API is not so smooth and often produces a flash, while slideshow use transition effects.
It was possible to display web pages in older Windows versions (it was named "Active Desktop"), but it's long dead now because of obvious security reasons.
Otherwise, everything you can create with an application will be ABOVE desktop icons. By design.
You can anyway use some programs that can somewhat perform suitable behavior:
SysInternals BgInfo: Allow to display various informations as an overlay to current wallpaper. Can display various system informations. Can also save you from creating some purely static display components for next tool.
Rainmeter: Allow to heavily customize your desktop with skins and "widgets" - they are still above icons, so see next one.
Desktop Restore: Allow to save/restore icons' positions for multiple configurations / resolutions. Can allow you to let Rainmeters' components in "blank" zones, free of icons.
Related
I need help with the text size for my outlook add in.
I have a table view in my add in which is unreadable with bigger screen resolutions. Is there a way to zoom so the font size gets bigger?
With a selected email from my inbox it is possible to zoom with the zoom slider in the bottom right corner. Is there a way to activate the zoom slider at any time? Or is there any way to access and change/set the font size outside of the email body?
It looks like your add-in is not DPI-aware. Desktop applications using older Windows programming technologies (raw Win32 programming, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), etc.) are unable to automatically handle DPI scaling without additional developer work. Without such work, applications will appear blurry or incorrectly-sized in many common usage scenarios. To make things working better you must read the following articles:
High DPI Desktop Application Development on Windows
Writing DPI-Aware Desktop and Win32 Applications
Most probably the table view is used on a windows form, see Automatic scaling in Windows Forms for more information.
I have the task of testing a web application where it is given that this app should fit a screen with the resolution of 1280*1024.
My work monitor is, however, a 20 inch screen with resolution 1680*1050.
Will resizing the Firefox window to 1280*1024 meet the test criteria or should I always change the resolution of my monitor? (Obviously, the second option is not preferred).
And also: Is there a Firefox plugin which will help me to set the window size appropriately?
Sometimes asking the question out loud helps to realise what you really want :)
There is Firefox addon called More Display Resolutions which helps to show the page in given resolution, even in 1280*1024
After you install it, just go to Tools -> Web Developer- > Responsive Design View and here you can turn on the preffered resolution:
Ok, the above died. What now?
Since time of writing this answer I changed jobs and do not have to test specific resolutions. But I did quick google search and this site seems to be working: http://quirktools.com/screenfly/
Responsive Design Mode is a stock part of Firefox which is available from the Menu Bar: Tools -> Web Developer -> Responsive Design View in all Firefox versions (keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + M, (or Cmd + Opt + M on OS X)). No extension is needed to access this mode.
Within Responsive Design Mode, you can set the exact display area used for the webpage. There are several preset dimensions. Alternately, custom display dimensions can be used by either directly typing the dimensions in, or dragging the display to the size desired. What is being set is the pixel dimensions used for the area containing the display of the webpage.
These dimensions are not the same as setting the pixel dimensions used for the entire screen, which would include the Firefox user interface. If you set it to the dimensions of a specific physical display size it is the same as would be displayed using Full Screen mode (on desktop versions, keyboard shortcut F11). If you want to see what your page will look like including the Firefox user interface, you will need to determine how many pixels the user interface consumes at the screen resolution you are interested in and on the platform you are intending to use (e.g. desktop, Android, iOS). You will then need to use a custom display size. Note that the amount of room used for the Firefox user interface will depend on many factors which include—in addition to the OS and resolution of the physical display—any theme the user has installed, which toolbars the user has chosen to display, and, potentially, which add-ons the user has installed.
This is what Responsive Design Mode looks like:
In some WMs it is possible to choose theme which affects how windows are displayed, e.g. how a background of a button is coloured.
If I draw a window using bare Xlib calls, what should I do to conform to these theme-affected settings? I.e. am I supposed to write specific code for every possible WM? How is it resolved in general?
There are several theme types and they sometimes play together, but they should not be confused.
Window manager/border themes describe the decorations of each window, not the content
UI toolkit themes/widget themes describe how buttons, text fields etc. are drawn within a window
Icon themes describe which icons are used, covering application icons as well as file icons, action icons, toolbar icons etc.
Color themes define a palette of colors to be used within the framework of the other themes
Pointer themes define a set of mouse pointer icons
Some desktop environments bundle all these themes in "desktop" themes, or at least provide a frontend to choose all of them. Yet, these themes are independent from the desktop environment and also from each other. It is possible to set them using configuration files.
If you want your application to fit with the user's preferences, first of all you should adhere to the Icon theme. The Pointer theme is taken care of by the X server, as long as you only use stock mouse icons and don't upload your own to the X server.
The second obvious thing would be the Color theme, but unfortunately there is no standard for color themes, both Gtk+ and Qt frameworks provide this functionality in an independent fashion (and desktop theme configurators understand and manipulate both to provide consistency). You could do some magic to find out whether the user prefers Gtk+ colors or Qt colors (e.g., is running Gnome or KDE) and then extract the colors somewhat from there.
The hardest thing however is to provide a look and feel of your UI elements that is true to the UI toolkit theme(s) the user has chosen. First you would again have to decide between Gtk+ and Qt (other toolkits that are themeable exist as well, but are typically not themed by the user, or niche players like Enlightenment). Then you would have to re-implement the same functionality. Interestingly, many themes come with their own theme engine in Gtk+, and it is possible to let the theme engine do the work for you. An approach that was picked-up by several parties already. Examples:
Java Swing supports mimicing Gtk+ applications by implementing the Gtk+ themeing API and letting the Gtk+ theme engines do the work, works with some inconsistencies.
Firefox and other Mozilla Apps using XUL also do this, but there are always annoying differences, starting with the default font size.
Qt itself has a compatibility Gtk+ theme, that basically does the same; this one works pretty well.
My suggestion is to not reinvent the wheel, instead use Qt (or Gtk+ if you prefer) for GUI elements that go beyond basic drawing operations. Note that from my experience, even primitive drawing is typically better done with Qt than with Xlib.
The user gets the look&feel she expects (not only the look), the interface is rich and stable, and you save considerable time writing all this stuff.
Assume a GUI application is opened on three machines running Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows7. In all the three machines, the screen resolution and the DPI settings are set to be the same value. Will there be a difference in the way the application is displayed on the screen in terms of number of pixels used and their position on the screen?
The reason for asking this question is:
I am using position based record-and-play method for GUI automation. Any change in the position of a control can impact the playback of the GUI recording. I want to be sure that a recording captured on Windowx XP platform works on Vista and Windows7 platforms.
Yes. The OS chrome (starting with window borders and titles) have different styles (e.g. Vista and Win7 will likely have Aero on and thus translucent title).
And that's before considering any OS dependent code in the application.
The menu bars will probably all be different sizes, so you'll probably need to record separately on all three machines.
Bearing in mind, that each user could have any number of accessibility settings on/off, any DPI setting, and also that features such as button sizes and window border sizes are different on each of these OS's...
No one here could possibly guarantee you'll be fine - the only way is to test.
A side note: there MUST be a better way than position based playback? I've used tools previously that can read screen text and base the automated navigation on that, which seems far more sensible, but still horribly flawed.
It seems Windows is unable to display different background images on different monitors on a multi-monitor system out of the box. But I noticed there are quite a few commercial applications available which provide this feature.
Which APIs can be (mis-)used to provide this functionality? If there's no special API for this feature, can it be done by hooking into another Win32 API function? If so, which one?
You could also try to programaticaly create an image the size of the virtual desktop joining several images making the divide fall where each monitor ends and then set that image as a wallpaper.
Simple and low tech.
Wallpaper replacement applications on Windows don't hook into the Windows API, they make a window the size of the desktop and render an image on it. There's APIs in Win32 to make such a window unclickable and living below everything else, and sized correctly for the desktop.