Mac OS X determines what area to scroll by the mouse position. Windows does this by what application is active.
So I thought anyway. If Notepad++ is the active application in Windows, I can scroll underlying applications by placing the mouse pointer on them. But this seems like the only application with this behaviour. Windows Explorer (Win7) doesn't even allow scrolling in the side pane if the pane is not active.
My question is, can this be controlled by developers, and why is Windows behaving like this? I am not about to make a Windows application, but as a developer this makes me curious (and annoyed).
There are a number of applications that do the focus-window-under-mouse, but I like Alt-Drag: http://code.google.com/p/altdrag/
Since the code is Open Source, you may find something reusable there.
Related
I am a noob when it comes to Desktop GUIs. Is there a way for me to programmitically figure out which application window is the top most in terms of display environment?
So, basically, I can have a process running in the background, that might then change the behavior of the top-most (or say the selected) window. My go to operating system would be MacOS (then Linux family). Also, for instance, there is an app called spectacle app, which listens to key bindings to snap resize and move active windows on MacOS.
I need to do a pre-purchase evaluation of a Flash application that is intended for a touch screen.
Since I still don't have the touchscreen now, I need to run the application on my desktop computer and the application is unusable without a visible cursor.
I am using Windows.
Is there a way to unhide the cursor without asking the developers to change the application?
I've previously used remote access software (such as Windows Remote Desktop or TeamViewer) for this purpose. Another option is a virtual machine - in both cases you'll be able to see the cursor on the local/host machine.
If you happen to be on a Windows 8 machine, you might give a try to the Windows Simulator (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2011/09/29/first-look-at-windows-simulator.aspx, available for free with Visual Studio Express) that additionally simulates multitouch gestures such as pinch/rotate with only a mouse.
A few other ideas:
1) You can try using the "Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key" mouse visibility property (Control Panel - Hardware and Sound - Devices and Printers - Mouse - Pointer options). Although not entirely convenient, it might help you if the application doesn't require quick response times.
2) If the application is distributed as a .swf file and the right button hasn't been disabled, sometimes right-clicking (anywhere in the application) to bring up the context menu will cause the cursor to show up and remain visible.
Basically I am supposed to press Command + the [`~] button that is above the Tab.
This question has been answered twice here:
Tabbing between Xcode projects?
and
Navigate Between Projects in XCode 4.0
But it just wont work for me, has anything changed in the xcode versions? or the way the mac behaves?
When I press this combination all I hear is the "invalid" sound.
I am using the newest Mac OS mountain lion.
Sorry if this belong to the super user stack overflow I just figured more Xcode users would be found here.
I can do the swipe on the mouse pad to bring the screen where I see all the active windows for the current application... but this is much slower than just tabbing between the 2 projects I'm usually working with.
Thanks
Do I infer from your comment about using the three finger swipe (for Mission Control) that the second window is not on the same desktop as the other windows? The command+` sequence only jumps between windows on the same desktop, not between different desktops (which is not to be confused with two physical monitors, which you can jump between, if you have multiple monitors hooked up to your computer).
The inability of command+` to not jump between desktops is a little curious, because command+tab, which jumps between apps, does go across desktops. If you want to jump between desktops, you can press control+1 or control+2 to jump to desktop 1 or 2, respectively. It should be noted, though, that while that might be a good alternative when trying to jump between your two desktops, though it admittedly selects the last active window in that other desktop, not necessarily a window from your current app in that other desktop. Also control+left and control+right let you jump between desktops, too.
This is a Mac OS "feature", not an Xcode issue, I believe. The command+` ability to jump between windows (but not windows across Mission Control desktops) is the same behavior across the Mac OS.
Update:
If this keyboard shortcut is not working at all, in any app, even within a single Mission Control desktop, then you don't need to worry about Xcode settings, but rather focus your attention on the keyboard settings:
You might want to look at your "Move focus to the next window" keyboard shortcut. There have been reported problems of people with international keyboards not getting this to work properly, but by clicking on (and thereby selecting) the command+` graphic, you can try using different keyboard shortcut, and see if that does it for you.
I have mountain lion as far as i know.
How about this?
control + down
You'll get the current application windows.
Below them there should be a horizontal list of recent projects for Xcode (both opened and closed). With arrows left or right choose the project (it should be highlighted with blue) and press enter.
I'm a Mac user and a Windows user (and once upon a time I used to be an Amiga user). I much prefer the menu-bar-at-the-top-of-the-screen approach that Mac (and Amiga) take (/took), and I'd like to write something for Windows that can provide this functionality (and work with existing applications).
I know this is a little ambitious, especially as it's just an itch-to-scratch type of a project and, thanks to a growing family, I have virtually zero free time. I looked in to this a few years a go and concluded that it was very difficult, but that was before StackOverflow ;)
I presume that I would need to do something like this to achieve the desired outcome:
Create application that will be the custom menu bar that sits on top of all other windows. The custom menus would have to provide all functionality to replace the standard Win32 in-window menus. That's OK, it's just an application that behaves like a menu bar.
It would continuously enumerate windows to find windows that are being created/destroyed. It would enumerate the child windows collection to find the menu bar.
It would build a menu that represents the menu options in the window.
It would hide the menu bar in the window and move all direct child windows up by a corresponding pixel amount. It would shorten the window height too.
It would capture all messages that an application sends to its menu, to adjust the custom menu accordingly.
It would constantly poll for the currently active window, so it can switch menus when necessary.
When a menu hit occurs, it would post a message to the window using the hwnd of the real menu child control.
That's it! Easy, eh? No, probably not.
I would really appreciate any advice from Win32 gurus about where to start, ideas, pitfalls, thoughts on if it's even possible. I'm not a Win32 C++ programmer by day, but I've done a bit in my time and I don't mind digging my way through the MSDN platform SDK docs...
(I also have another idea, to create a taskbar for each screen in a multi-monitor setup and show the active windows for the desktop -- but I think I can do that in managed code and save myself a lot of work).
The real difference between the Mac menu accross the top, and the Windows approach, is not just in the menu :- Its how the menu is used to crack open MDI apps.
In windows, MDI applications - like dev studio and office - have all their document windows hosted inside an application frame window. On the Mac, there are no per-application frame windows, all document windows share the desktop with all other document windows from other applications.
Lacking the ability to do a deep rework of traditional MDI apps to get their document windows out and onto the desktop, an attempt, however noble, to get a desktop menu, seems doomed to be a novelty with no real use or utility.
I am, all things considered, rather depressed by the current state of window managers on both Mac and Windows (and Linux): Things like tabbed paged in browsers are really acts of desperation by application developers who have not been given such things as part of the standard window manager - which is where I believe tabs really belong. Why should notepad++ have a set of tabs, and chrome, and firefox, and internet explorer (yes, I have been known to run all 4), along with dev studios docking view, various paint programs.
Its just a mess of different interpretations of what a modern multi document interface should look like.
The menu bar on a typical window is part of the non-client area of the window. It's drawn when the WndProc gets a WM_NCPAINT message and passes it on to DefWindowProc, which is part of User32.dll - the core window manager code.
Other things that are drawn in the same message? The caption, the window borders, the min/max/close boxes. These are all drawn while processing a single message. So in order to hide the menu for an application, you will have to take over handling of this message, which means changing the behavior of user32.dll. Hiding the menu is going to mean that you become responsible for drawing all of the non-client area.
And the appearance of all of these elements - The caption, the borders, etc. changes with every major version of Windows. So you have to chase that as well.
That's just one of about a dozen insurmountable problems with this idea. Even Microsoft probably couldn't pull this off and they have access to the source code of user32.dll!
It would be a far less difficult job to echo the menu for each application at the top of the screen, and even that is a nearly impossible job. When the menu pops there is lots of interaction with the application during which the menu can be (and often is) changed. It is very common for applications to change the state of menu items just before they are drawn. So you will have to replicate not only the appearance of the menus, but their entire message flow interaction with the application.
What you are trying to do is about a dozen impossible jobs all at once, If you try it, you will probably learn a lot, but you will never get it to work.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but I have the following behavior in Visual Studio 2005 while designing forms:
1 - Drop a control onto the form (suppose it's a Label, just for discussion)
2 - Drag that label to a specific location (aligning w/other controls, whatever)
3 - Release the mouse button
4 - The control is still stuck to the mouse!!!
To get it un-stuck from the mouse, I have to hit ESC, which restores the Label to it's original location.
This is driving me nuts. I literally have to use the arrow keys to move each control into place, pixel-by-pixel. I don't observe this behavior anywhere else in VS2005, nor do I observe it in the OS in general.
I am running on Windows XP inside a Parallels Virtual Machine, hosted on OS X. I don't think there is a driver problem though, b/c as I already said, no other apps demonstrate anything like this.
Please tell me there is some tiny checkbox buried somewhere that will turn off this behavior.
Sounds like you might have ClickLock enabled (or a similar feature). Try this:
Go to Control Panel in Windows
Open the Mouse control panel
Go to the Activities tab
Deselect ClickLock
If that doesn't work, maybe you have a similar feature in OS X?
This problem spread to other applications within my VM, so I reinstalled Parallels tools and it went away.