On Microsoft Windows 11, is it possible to change the resolution of a single and specific application ?
Let's say that I have a 4k resolution. Some applications are readable, but some are really not. The fonts, the buttons, the images... are too small. I would be great to make the application bigger (like games can run in a different resolution).
Therefore I will not need to change the resolution down and up on a daily basis for just one program or two.
Answer
You cannot.
Workaround
What you can do is make sure the application does not have an assembly manfiest that says it is dpiAware. Because even though it might have a manifest that says it is dpi aware: it obviously isn't.
Once the application is not dpiAware, you can scale your Windows to 125%, 150%, 200%, etc, and let Windows scale the application for you.
I am UX designer designing educational activities for schools. These a responsive websites. When I have come to do QA I have seen everything is HUGE on Windows. The devs tell me that default resolution for Windows is 150%... Um – what? I've been in this game a long time and I have not encountered this. This makes no sense... Has anyone encountered something like this?
It seems like Windows tries to find a good physical size for its icons, and that falls upon the resolution and the physical size of the screen.
For our end users, display scaling is a platform technology ensuring that content is presented at a consistent and optimal–yet easily adjustable–size for readability and comprehension on every device.
I have several laptops to check what the recommended scaling was set as.
15' laptop at 1920x1080: recommended scaling was 125%.
17' laptop at 1366x768: recommended scaling was 100%.
12' tablet at 2160x1440: recommended scaling was 150%.
because the density of the pixels are different on all these screens, windows appears to automatically set a scaling value that it thinks looks like a good size.
Other examples
One
Two
This is a bug. Once a user chooses their preferred setting, Windows should leave it alone. I have resigned myself to resetting it manually each time I logon.
I work on a desktop application that we sometimes have to run on a virtual machine using Windows Remote Desktop for access. Fonts and gradients are noticeably degraded in appearance when running through Remote Desktop. The fonts are clearly not anti-aliased (and are normally) The gradients degenerate into much larger bands of solid color, losing the smoother look. Initially, I had assumed Windows was doing this to improve performance, but when I compared application fonts in our produce with those in other applications (Visual Studio specifically), I see that Qt is definitely rendered fonts in dialogs and QGraphicsScene differently.
In the application title bar of my app, I see that the font exactly matches the appearance of other application title bars, and that makes sense because Windows draws that. Within my application, all of the top menu items and fonts on dialogs are not anti-aliased and look terrible. We use QGraphicsScene extensively, and those fonts are degraded as well.
I don't have another application that generates gradients to compare those, but I viewed a high resolution image through the Remote Desktop connection using the Windows image viewer, and it looks just as good as on a local desktop.
The degraded appearance means that we can't do screen shots for documentation while using the VM. We are also frequently required to do demos using VMs and Remote Desktop, and the appearance is not appealing to show to customers. In our industry and within our company, there's increasing pressure to use VMs instead of local, physical machines, so this is becoming a bigger problem.
Both symptoms lead me to believe that Qt knows that I'm visualizing through Remote Desktop and that it is choosing to degrade appearance in favor of performance. I don't want that, or at the very least, I need to control it.
I suspect this is buried somewhere in Qt's style/theme system, but I haven't had any luck finding clues that would point me to the correct place to do something about this, or at least an answer that indicates whether or not it's even possible. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
With QGraphicScene we have OpenGL for rendering. And with some of VMs we mostly rely on software simulating OpenGL via MS DirectX, which is for software and not hardware supported rendering. The most popular software OpenGL rendering is based on ANGLE.
To improve the rendering on VM I would try to build a custom Qt for your app using one of proposed Qt build configurations to configure specific Windows Qt build.
With Qt evolving it gets a bit confusing: which configuration is the best. I was told that since Qt 5.5 -opengl dynamic will be an optimal for most of environments. I used to configure -opengl es2 configuration with Qt 5.3 and that worked well without degrading the graphics but mind that VMs used are from VMware and not MS Hyper-V that would not even allow the app to load due to OpenGL failing to initialize and I could not make ANGLE to help here with that specific Qt.
I was able to address the issue with fonts in QGraphicsScene. Because of the nature of our product, the font handling for graphics items was fairly specialized, and very early in development when I was very new to Qt, I had set the style strategy to those fonts to QFont::ForceOutline because I didn't want the font matching to use any bitmapped fonts. Through experimentation, I found that this strategy results in the fonts not being anti-aliased when running through Remote Desktop. Changing to QFont::PreferAntialias addressed the problem for the fonts in the scene, and that's a substantial and welcome improvement.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a solution for the general application fonts, nor for the gradient degradation, but at least with the fonts, I have something more to go on. My next step will be to start inspecting the fonts that Qt is using by default on some of the widgets and seeing what their attributes are.
I want my program to be able to launch any Windows game, and while the user is playing it, intermittently display some text or pictures in some part of the game window. The game may be in windowed or full-screen mode. From what I have been able to figure out from online resources, this could be done using a graphics library that supports overlays and using Windows Hooks to keep track of the target application's window. In this context I have some questions.
Will the overlays affect the game's performance?
How will hooking the application affect performance?
Is there any other way one could achieve this? For example, how do you think PIX, the DirectX debugging and analysis tool, work?
Fraps is the archetypal example of doing this sort of thing to a fullscreen DirectX application from a third-party app. It works by hooking some system calls and inserting itself into the call-chain between an app and DirectX. There is some performance hit, but in general its minimal.
This page seems to have some details and sample code on how to hook the app in this way.
If I recall correctly, from other forum discussions (can't find the link at the moment. search for things like "how does fraps work", it's a popular question), Fraps hooks a few things to force the app to load its DLL, then hooks Present() calls and executes a device->Clear() call before calling the real Present(), with a list of small rectangles to set to a different color, which can spell out the FPS number that it displays. This has a minimal performance impact and is widely compatible with whatever rendering the app is doing. Overlaying a bitmap would be more complicated since it wouldn't be as easy to do at Present-time. Perhaps if you could hook EndScene, then you could do more, but you would have to be careful to not change the device state.
PIX has privileged access to the DirectX driver, so I wouldn't expect to be able to use that as a model to emulate.
If an the target app is running in windowed mode, hooking DirectX still work, but you could also just use GDI instead.
Edit: I think this is the link I was originally thinking of.
There are many more technologies and tools available to build the front end for an application.
Which is the best technology/tool/platform available using which I can build a better GUI, by which I'll be able to build a nice looking as well as an efficient GUI?
Definition of "better" includes factors such as efficiency,user friendliness,better content control mechanism, navigation and many more.
I know this is a question about which GUI toolkit you should use, but your first technology for producing a user-friendly UI is pen and paper. Sketch out some mock-ups. Draw buttons and menus on construction paper, cut them out, and glue them together. Then try your mockups on about a half-dozen people. You'll quickly find out what makes a good UI.
It doesn't matter how good the UI looks or whether it uses the latest snazzy effects -- if your users can't figure out how to use it, they'll go elsewhere. You need to learn what works for your target audience before you write a single line of code.
Read Don't Make Me Think to learn how to make mock-ups and do user testing.
If' you're tracking an IP address, you'll definitely want to create your GUI Interface in Visual Basic.
Use the .NET framework in Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010 Studio. I haven't developed in any other environment, but I have been able to create nice looking apps in this IDE / Framework.
"Best" depends on what your evaluation function is.
For ease of development, and high quality UI, in a non-web based app it's hard to beat C#/VB or any other .NET language and environment for a windows-based app. Depending on the quality of the UI, MPF will give you greater flexibility and control, whereas windows form will make it easier to develop.
Having used Windows Presentation Foundation for a while now i would highly recommend it. There is a pretty big learning curve and, to be honest, MSFT should have included some controls (the datagrid being the biggest one) that were not included by default (but will be in .NET 4.0). Where WPF and XAML exceed is providing a foundation from which you can build just about anything. You can style ANY part of ANY control and build your own composite controls from scratch. A lot of thought went into binding and value converters and once you get used to the declarative nature of XAML you wont want to turn back. The company I work for has been using it for a couple of years now and the difference between the GUIs we used to develop (mainly winforms and asp.net) and what we develop now are night and day in terms of both look-and-feel and functionality. My two cents anyway...
It depends.
What device will the GUI be used on, hand held, PC, Mac?
What platform Windows, Linux, Web?
What kind of application will it be, accounting, email client, web application?
What audience will be using the application (a GUI aimed at a child may be different than one aimed at an adult)?
All of these things must be taken into account before even starting to formulate an answer to your question.
You have several choices for developing a GUI.
first, if cross platform is an issue consider using Java or Python.
you can also use Adobe AIR and develop the gui in Flex.
If you direct the product to windows only users .NET WPF is the best solution, with a very rich set of control and examples.
You can also use .NET with mono for cross platform compatibility, but WPF isn't currently supported.
Desktop, Mobile, Windows, Linux, Database, OpenGL: Nokia Qt. Wiht Python - PyQt development process is shortest and easy. Application containing all required python & qt libraries and modules is around 30MB with Inno Setup installation is 8MB and will work on Windows 2000 and newer for Python 2.6.x, Python 2.5.x based application will run from Windows 95 to Windows 7.
I think all the attributes you list -- efficiency, user friendliness, etc -- are attributes of a good design rather than a good toolkit. Just about any toolkit can be used to meet those goals. I think the question might be different if you were asking about eye candy, fancy multi-media, etc. There are definitely some toolkits that do that better than others.
If you're interested in usability first (and it sounds like you are), focus on the design then pick whatever toolkit meets your current abilities and can handle your design. For example, if you require 3D images that might narrow your choices; likewise if you need to show videos, that will influence which toolkits you can choose from.
So, start with a good design. From that, create a list of requires for the toolkit -- rich editing controls, video, 3D, etc. And then look for a toolkit that provides what you need.
The best toolkit in the world won't make up for poor design.
Personally after having used Win32, Forms and WPF then going to Mac/iPhone GUI development, I very much prefer the flexibility and high quality of visuals in the Mac/iPhone GUI.
One of the most useful examples is the fact that in NSTable/UITable controls (ListViews or similar in Windows), every cell is a fully customisable View (a Control in Windows).
Where in a ListView you have very little customisation for each cell/item in the view since you only provide details, not an actual control, an NSTable/UITable asks you for a table cell which you can add anything to, such as buttons, switches and image views.
Mac OS GUI development to me is a LOT more flexible and more consistently flexible in that regard. Everything is a View so I can my own contents to anything.
Have you considered Silverlight?
It can be used to create internet applications, but it can also be run out of browser to create desktop applications. It's has significant overlap with WPF though there are differences which might catch you out when swapping from one to the other.
Expression Blend 3 is a very good visual designer and the code it produces is quite efficient.