How do I create an animated theme for windows XP? I know how to create normal themes, but can't seem to find anythoing on adding animation.
This is what I need:
The Start menu should be themed like an iPhone, so I slide to lock/unlock the start menu.
Any ideas?
I really don't know if this is possible. You might be able to use some of Stardock's
products to cobble something together...
Related
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#?
Several iLife '11 applications on the Mac use iOS-style black toolbars. For instance, the toolbar at the bottom of this screenshot of iPhoto:
(source: pocket-lint.com)
This sort of look is available in the iOS SDK as "UITabBar."
I am wondering if there is an easy way to achieve this in my ordinary, non-iOS Mac application. If not, what would be the best way to go about creating this effect?
There's nothing that will give you this view out of the box. You'll need to build it yourself.
The simplest method would be to create a custom view with a gradient background and place monochrome buttons in it.
Better would be to create a set of classes similar to NSToolBar that handle positioning, highlighting etc. Even better, build it and then open-source it :-)
However, you'll have to build it yourself. Apart from NSButton there's not much that will help in the pre-existing objects.
I'm looking for a program to create window transparency within Windows XP; somewhat like Glass2K. I've used Glass2K and found it extremely processor intensive and would like to try something else.
The application needs to act upon the current Windows Theme rather than be a theme itself like Aero Glass.
Perhaps you're looking for PowerMenu.
I have an MDI application written in C++ that looks great under Windows XP. All of the MDI child windows end up looking like their parent window. Nice. However, under Windows 7 (and probably Vista), the parent windows have aero glass, and the child windows are this hideous unchangeable baby blue color (same as the Windows 7 Basic theme). So my application really looks very very bad.
You can see this same ugly behavior by launching Office 2003 and try looking at MDI child windows (perhaps in Excel). However, Office 2007 actually has three color themes - blue, silver, and black. These themes somehow carry through to the MDI child windows in Excel.
I don't know how Microsoft is doing this in Office 2007. I would love to know the trick. I need to hook and takeover the drawing of my MDI child windows and replicate what the Office 2007 team has pulled off. The problem is that I want to use all of the DrawTheme* calls so I get the gradients and rounded edges and buttons all drawn properly. And all of these system calls need a handle to a theme. But it doesn't seem to be possible to, for example, use SetWindowTheme to change to use the color scheme from another theme. At least as far as I can tell.
Anyone know how Microsoft accomplished this?
It's not a great solution, but poking around on the web, I found this article about how to place a WinXP rounded look into the squarish flat Win95/Win98/Win2k window style. It works by using BMP snapshots of the WinXP theme and than using bitblit functions to stretch them to appropriate sizes around the window frame border. I tried his demo software, and sure enough, it looks like WinXP Luna under Win7. I can use his example as a basis to hook and replace my MDI child window frame drawing.
The problem with this approach is that you either have to pick a titlebar width and stick with it and not respond to global theme adjustments that change the titlebar height, or you have to take many different BMP snapshots at different sizes. For my purposes, it is probably fine to just stick to one thickness and ignore user theme adjustments. Once in place, I can apply different themes just by BMP snapshotting them - so I could also apply the Office 2007 MDI child look as well.
im currently overiding the WM_NCPAINT, WM_NCCALCSIZE and WM_NCACTIVATE to paint my own color/themed title bar for an application im working on. Now this is working great however the min, max and close buttons still are xp default theme.
I looked into what controls them and the mouse messages do. However they also contol resizing and other functions that I dont want to lose.
Is there an easy way to just change the theme of these buttons?
Windows XP
MFC Forms
Visual studio 2005
I think your best bet here is to disable the buttons and redraw them with something akin to to the code I posted in this answer. It's in C# with WinForms, but the vast majority of it is overloaded WndProc() anyway, which you should be able to use almost copy/paste into MFC.
Implementing click handlers to do what you want them to do is trivial.
Note: The asker of that question said the code didn't work in Vista. I don't have a Vista box, but it works for me in XP.
This also helped: http://www.catch22.net/tuts/titlebar
You can also check out how it's done in MFC Next (VS2008 SP1). The theming support there does custom draw of the whole title bar, you can get a few ideas from that. I presume they tested it on Vista, too ;)