i want to make an animated wallpaper for windows. So far i have only expreience with Mac OS X programming and i'm new to windows. So i decided to work with QT because it seems that there is more help out there.
Until now i have created the app in a borderless window in qt. It work quiet fine.
But is there a way in QT to change the level of the window so that its appear above the windows wallpaper but behind the icons?
EDIT:
Ok if found a simple solution.
After some testing with the hints form kusg1 I figured out when there is a transparent window mouse events going still to the desktop.
I actualy want have this website has wallpaper: Ticketack. - So i created a frameless window which stays on bottom and has a transparent background and displays the text. Beside this i can change the windows wallpaper directly to get the background of the clock.
So clock text is not behind the icons but i think this will be ok.
Just some ideas: Use the windows flag as Qt::Window | Qt::FramelessWindowHint + Windows Stay at bottom hint, and set the content of the widget with your animated content (the suitable candidate is to use QGraphicsView).
The widget needs two main tasks:
Upon launching, it grabs the desktop background as pixmap and do overlay with the animated content (this needs to have the desktop to be wallpaper-less for simple scenario).
The widget needs to capture mouse and focus event and channel back to actual window command if the user wants to click the icon on the desktop.
Update:
Some pointers for the implementation:
For managing desktop icon, there is a good article here! (also found from SO).
Qt example and demos has an example on the taking desktop snapshot, the snippet is: QPixmap::grabWindow(QApplication::desktop()->winId());
Answer to your question: no, there isn't.
However, you can try something like this using Windows API: How to draw directly on the Windows desktop, C#?
Related
I have a large legacy application which is showing up with a perpetually grey border on every Windows 8 machine we run it on, while the other windows for other apps accurately use a color derived from the desktop background. For the life of me I can't find out why.
I've tried my best google-fu to crawl MSDN for APIs to control this but came up empty. The app looks like all others in Windows XP, Vista, and 7...just Windows 8 is grey in color. We definitely haven't added Win8 specific code to treat this otherwise.
It's just an MFC window on the outside, but inside it embeds a .NET/WPF component and a Direct3D 9-enabled visual area.
My best guess is it could somehow be related to having a Direct3D surface in the window, but I couldn't validate that anywhere.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
Edit: The grey matches the effect of not having focus, and we definitely do play games with window focus...so that could be it.
The problem was a developer overloaded OnNcActivate() and returned TRUE at the end. They needed to call up to the baseclass's (CWnd) OnNcActivate instead.
This was visible on Windows 7 as well if you looked close enough.
The Desktop in Windows 8 does not use transparency in window borders like Windows 7 and Vista did with the Aero Themes. If you are move the focus to another top window in your app, this could explain why your seeing the grey border. Try changing the colors for windows without the focus to something discernable from grey to verify that is what you are seeing.
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background changes the desktop background view to the screensaver view.
How is that implemented?
(How) can I do this myself?
Set a window's level as kCGDesktopWindowLevel and it will appear on top of the desktop picture but under the icons. You'll probably also want to tell the window to ignore mouse clicks unless you want to render portions of the desktop unclickable.
(To clarify: I haven't checked, but I kind of doubt this is actually how the ScreenSaverEngine does its trick. Apple can mingle its apps with each other in ways that you can't — for example, many of the system-provided Menu Extras are half implemented in their .menu bundles and half in the SystemUIServer host process. But this technique gets the effect you're looking for.)
Im writing an application for workers in our factory and one of requirements is that they should be able to take images using camera integrated in PDA with WM6.5.
The main difficulty is, that thay MUST NEVER EVER be able to enter windows, Start button, desktop etc. They are allowed ONLY to see my fullscreen application.
I succesfully deactivated BlueTooth + red, green and volume buttons (if you are interested, im pasting links here)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=546737
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb431750.aspx
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vssmartdevicesvbcs/thread/a4f9f41d-47a8-4080-8613-2c2ddcf4c012/
And now I have to implement the camera function. But as CameraCaptureDialog opens a new dialog and shows start button, task bar and allows user to open list of applications, I must not use it.
I must create my own dialog that will show the Live Preview in a panel or in an imageBox and photo will be taken using a button.
I searched the whole internet and found only DirectShow.NETCF (but people do not recommend it) and CameraCaptureDialog.
Can I somehow redirect the CameraCaptureDialog to my dialog? Or can I access camera directly via .NET framework? Or can I modify the CameraCaptureDialog not to show Start button, menu etc?
Looks like you have a bit of a challenge. I agree that Directshow is a questionable solution, but it may be your only option. I did get http://alexmogurenko.com/blog/directshownetcf/ to work, but only on low resolutions.
A better option might be to find a device that does not show the menu bar/start button. AFAIK, the HTC HD2 has a very clean Cameracapturedialog..
Good luck.
I have my laptop default screen and second screen. How can I write RealBasic, VisualBasic (Java not possible) application which can allow me to paint on desktop (both screen)?
Most likely you won't be able to draw directly to the screen, but you could potentially grab screenshots of each screen and then draw onto those. Depending on what exactly you're trying to do with your application, it would almost definitely be a more realistic goal to grab a screenshot of each screen and then simply display the screenshots in standard windows that take up the entire screen, letting you then edit and "draw" onto the screen there.
Another option would be to create a transparent window, and then intercept mouse clicks and present information on that window.
If you're using RB on a Mac, you can use the Monkeybread Software Plugin to create a NSWindowMBS and modify the alpha value or an OverlayWindowMBS. It looks like you're trying to do this on Windows, though, so this won't work.
I'm trying to take screenshots of all open windows, also the minimized ones. Currently I'm using this code:
http://www.developerfusion.com/code/4630/capture-a-screen-shot/
But it doesn't work for minimized windows and the areas where there is a Glass effect since Vista like the explorer title bar are black. Can anyone help me out?
My objective is to create something similar to Flip 3D; it would be great if someone also knew something about how to create a live preview.
For the glass effect areas: I think it doesn't work because those areas may be drawn with some strange DirectX method instead of normal GDI.
For the minimized windows problem: if a window is minimized, its DC isn't painted (conceptually, it doesn't even have a reason to exist); you should try to send to such windows a WM_PRINT message, asking them to paint themselves on the DC you'll provide them. The problem with this approach is that not all the windows handle correctly WM_PRINT.
I've found the API that is used for the taskbar previews a.s.o.:
DWM Thumbnail Overview
Pretty awesome, it even allows you to do live previews!