I need a window to 'point' to the icon that was clicked on in the dock, similar to the way the context menu has the little callout-arrow pointing to it. This means I need to get the screen location of the dock, or more accurately the DockTile. (Yes I could use the mouse coordinates, but that doesn't look as good as it 'moves'.)
Now my thought is to get the associated view (I already have that), then use view-to-screen coordinate conversions, but that's becoming problematic as the x/left and y/top values of the bounding rectangle always say zero. I know that's because there's a nested hierarchy of views as well. Problem is I've walked it and always end up hitting a road block.
So thoughts?
Mark
You can get the dock icon positions using the accessibility API, there's some excellent sample code and app from Apple here.
Related
If you have a folder sorted by a certain column, and then you click and drag the vertical scrollbar, Explorer will display a little helper rectangle showing where in the sort list you currently are. This is what I'm talking about:
I was wondering if anyone knew how to obtain a handle or UIAutomation ID of that little rectangle (if one exists). So far I've been trying with Spy++ and Inspect, but I can't seem to figure it out (in part because the rectangle is fleeting and disappears as soon as you lift the mouse button). Thank you for any response or guidance.
For mouse I'm using:
ourEvent = CGEventCreate(None);
currentpos = CGEventGetLocation(ourEvent);
What can I use for the caret?
First the bad news.
Not every app is Cocoa-based, and those that are neither Cocoa nor Carbon nor a straight mix of the two—i.e., those based on wxWidgets, Qt, or some other cross-platform framework—typically reimplement the entire GUI stack on top of raw event and drawing primitives.
That means that there is typically no way to get this information from those applications (unless they're scriptable and expose it that way).
The good news is, Cocoa apps and some Carbon apps may expose this via Accessibility.
The user will need to have assistive devices turned on in System Preferences. Once that condition is met, you can use the Accessibility framework to get the frontmost application, get its focused window, get its focused view, and get its selection ranges.
A text view with an insertion point has exactly one selection range, and that range is empty (length=0). The location is where the insertion point is.
Of course, those are character indexes, not on-screen bounds.
That's where parameterized attributes come in. There's one for converting ranges to bounds. That's the one you want.
Theoretically (I haven't tried this), you should be able to convert the empty range of the insertion point to an empty or nearly-empty rectangle whose location is somewhere within the vertical line of the insertion point.
Make sure you test this with text views that are in scroll views, particularly when the insertion point is scrolled partially or completely out of view.
You'll want to use the Accessibility Inspector to see for yourself where your application will need to look, and to test individual applications and investigate reported failures.
You can get it from the Developer Downloads page, in the “Accessibility Tools” disk image.
If you want to focus a window, forging a mouse event to click on it is a bad idea—anything can happen if you click on the wrong thing. Send the window an kAXRaiseAction action instead.
If you want to set a text view's insertion point (and are looking to find where you need to forge a mouse event to click to set it in the desired position), again, that's a bad way to do it. Set the view's kAXSelectedTextRangesAttribute attribute instead. Again, an insertion point is a single empty range.
Did you try like this below?
NSPoint p=[[NSApp currentEvent]locationInWindow];
CGFloat X=p.x;
CGFloat Y=p.y;
NSLog(#"%f %f",X,Y);
It is possible to use the SetWindowPos API on Windows to keep a windows always on top of other windows, and there are many questions on StackOverflow dealing with this.
It is possible to keep only part of a Window always visible? I.e. specify a clipping region inside an existing window, and keep only that part visible?
A use case would be the following (on Windows):
User clicks on icon to run app.
User highlights a portion of the screen to focus on (similar to the Snipping Tool on Windows 7)
The highlighted part of the screen remains always visible, even when other windows/programs are moved over the selected region.
I know the issues that would spring up with having other applications that are also set to being topmost. Just curious if this is even possible?
Even if you change part of your window to be transparent to what's below (with a clipping region) it's still going to take all the mouse clicks, etc. that occur over the transparent part.
Your best bet is to create a new smaller window and make it top-most while hiding the main one.
My application is a Windows Forms one.
I tried using the windows wallpaper, but this depends on the "Fill", "Stretch", "Fit" or "Tile" settings.
I just need the image as it is on the desktop, but including the part "under" the taskbar, because this part is visible in case of transparent taskbar.
Why I need this?
Because I have a tray application which slides from under the taskbar when opening. And I need to set a mask there, so it can't be seen sliding, until it reaches the top of the taskbar. Again, this is only a problem when the taskbar is transparent.
I am not sure if I understood your question correctly. But to me, it seems that you need the image that has created wallpaper. If it seems easier, take a look at registry entries at following location:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
This will give you the path, size, tile/no tile etc. information for the wallpaper.
There is a Win32 function called PaintDesktop you could try but unless I'm misunderstanding things you should be able to just adjust the height of your window so it is never really behind the taskbar...
Why I need this? Because I have a tray application which slides from under the taskbar when opening. And I need to set a mask there, so it can't be seen sliding, until it reaches the top of the taskbar. Again, this is only a problem when the taskbar is transparent.
The problem here is that you're starting the slide up from the bottom of the entire screen, rather than starting from the bottom of the screen's working area (i.e., the top of the taskbar). That's why you're seeing the pop-up window slide up behind a transparent taskbar.
Luckily, the solution is much simpler than obtaining the desktop background and/or doing any type of masking. It's also much faster, and it's always good that your eye candy isn't unnecessarily taxing the user's computer.
All you need to do is determine the coordinates of the screen's working area, which is defined by Windows as the area that can be used by applications, not including the taskbar and other side bars. You can obtain this information easily in WinForms by querying the Screen.PrimaryScreen.WorkingArea property. This will return a Rectangle that corresponds to the primary screen's working area. Since you know that the taskbar is always displayed on the primary screen, this is exactly what you want.
Once you have the coordinates of the primary screen's working area, start your pop-up window's slide from the bottom of that.*
This is a good lesson of why you should always include an explanation of why you want to accomplish something. There's often an even better way that you haven't thought of.
*Of course, I'm ignoring the fact that a user might not have their taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen. You can put it on either side or even on top. It sounds to me like you haven't considered this in your question, either. If this is an app that you're writing only for yourself or for a controlled environment where you can be sure that no one has their taskbar in non-default positions, that might be OK. But if you're writing software to distribute to a wider audience, you will need to take this into account. The rcWork coordinates will be correct, regardless of where the taskbar is positioned, of course, but you will need to know whether to start the pop-up window's slide from the bottom, the left side, the right side, or the top.
I'm trying to work out what the best way to draw over the top of all other items on the screen on OS X. I don't want to impede the user's ability to interact with their applications, but want to 'annotate' them. I want to be able to draw up to 20 different annotations. The top half of this screenshot from Gizmodo happens to nicely show the kind of thing I want to do. http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2006/07/04%20Safari.jpg (sorry, I'm too new to post it as an image)
The questions I think I need to answer are:
Should I create a single window for
each drawing and draw to that? If
so, how do I minimise overhead?
What kind of window or other context should I use given that I don't want any window
decoration?
I don't think I want the overhead of creating 20 windows, but I also don't know that I want to create a full-screen, invisible window that contains my context (I presume a subclassed NSView), because I fear that will a) cause problems interacting with what's below and b) break the niceties of only redrawing when necessary (my actual drawing will likely only cover 10% of the screen)
I've not worked with Quartz2d before, so I just can't get my head around how to get the 'right' context to draw on from the documentation. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Who
You can only draw into a window. You can make a transparent, borderless window but it will need to be at the front.
You could set it's level to something like NSPopUpMenuWindowLevel to make it draw above other windows (this will be very annoying to users) but clicking on it will:
a) activate and bring to the front your app
b) Prevent the app underneath receiving mouse events
Is that what you want?