How can I implement a non-modal sliding notification bar, such as Firefox, Beyond Compare, and VMware Workstation 6.5 use, in client-side Windows apps?
Any language or framework is fine for now; my current app is in Delphi / C++Builder, but I'm also interested in comparing frameworks and prototyping some UIs.
Related question: This question asks about doing so in Java.
Beyond Compare's notification bar doesn't slide, it just pops open, so I can't offer any help on that. The notification bar itself is just a TPanel with a TImage and TLabel for the image/text. It's placed on the main window at design time and it's set to align bottom. Normally it's hidden, and when there's a message to display we set the Visible property to true.
There's different ways to hide the notification, depending on how you want it to behave. In BC we install keyboard and mouse hooks (SetWindowsHookEx with WH_KEYBOARD or WH_MOUSE) and hide it on key up and mouse button events. Alternatively, like Mark said, you could hide it after a delay, add a close button to the side, or just watch for specific events in your app and manually hide it then.
In Delphi, I believe that you can change a property on the Dialog itself (change the window type away from "Dialog" and select the standard windowed alternative). Sorry I cannot be more specific, it has been about two years since I last worked on a Delphi app.
Related
I want to achieve a certain window behavior for a macOS app. I subclassed NSWindow to be able to add additional properties. So far, it works well with almost all requirements (dragging it, clicking buttons) while preserving the core requirement of not making the currently active app losing focus. What does not work is making the window's UI elements react to mouse-hover events.
Requirements:
☑️ Don't activate the app when showing the window → _setPreventsActivation:true
☑️ Prevent activation of the app when interacting with the window (click/drag) → _setPreventsActivation:true
﹖Make the window react to mouse hover events over interactive UI elements without activating the app
An example of an application that does very much what I intend to do (UX-wise) is 1Password. Here is a short clip: An animated GIF showing 1Password UX
Can someone explain what they likely do to make their window behave this way?
I am working on a windows phone 8 c# application. I have to get long tap events of Forward and Backward buttons that I have placed in the Application bar, but found only Click event for application bar button.
Please let me know how to capture the long tap event for an application bar button?
Thanks in Advance
This is not possible. The ApplicationBar API is quite restrictive, which is a deliberate move by Microsoft to ensure consistency. You cannot handle arbitrary events from the ApplicationBar. If you want this kind of behaviour, you will have to build your own UI to support it.
It is worth noting that your users will not expect 'long press' (more commonly referred to as tap-and-hold) behaviour on the app-bar.
I have a desktop application written in Ruby that is using GTK2. It's just a small test application to play with GTK2, but I'm having problems achieving what I want to do. Is there any way using GTK2 to get at the titlebar (apart from setting the title), specifically to either add a button to it (beside the min/max/etc, B in the below diagram) or to add an option to the menu that pops up when you click the icon on the titlebar (A in the below diagram)?
I'm thinking there might not be because GTK is meant to work with many many different window managers, but I just wondered if there was. As a side question, what event does clicking the 'cross' button fire? At the moment if the user clicks that the window disappears but the program doesn't end - I need to capture that event and quit the program.
Thanks for any help, including hitting me over the head and telling me how silly I am.
Note that this is possible in GTK 3.10 and up, by using gtk_window_set_titlebar(). It replaces the window manager's title bar with a custom one. GtkHeaderBar is a good custom title bar class to use.
You can't, however, make it look just like the window manager would, because you won't know which window manager the user is running.
No, the title bar is owned by the window manager and you will typically not have direct access to it.
When the user tries to close the window by clicking the window manager's button, the window will receive the delete event.
Simple question:
How do I detect that the onscreen keyboard has been displayed on windows mobile 7? Is there an event I can add a listener to?
It takes up about half the screen and I want to scroll the view up when it gets displayed...
EDIT:
A comment below indicates more clearly what I'm trying to do: I have a textbox input, and as the user types into it an autocomplete dropdown appears below it (like google suggest). By default, the active control (the textbox) scrolls into view when focussed, and the onscreen keyboard is directly below it. The onscreen keyboard appears in front of my autocomplete dropdown - what I want to do is make the screen scroll a little further up, so there's some room for my dropdown to be shown.
The windows phone UI design guidelines say: "When the keyboard is deployed, the application should scroll to ensure the active edit control and the caret are in view". This happens fine, it's just the non-active dropdown gets hidden behind the onscreen keyboard.
The guidelines also say that an application can choose to show the onscreen keyboard, and can also choose to close it.
At the moment i'm stuck, and I don't think (based on my research and the replies to this question) that it's possible to detect that the onscreen keyboard has been displayed. I'm moving my investigation to see if it's possible to determine the "visible area" of the page (width & height in pixels for example), and combine this with an onfocus for the textbox... not sure if this will prove fruitful though.
Detecting when the virtual keyboard is displayed won't be possible in 7.0, as confirmed by Microsoft's Peter Torr in the WP7 forum on MSDN.
Maybe, as a dirty workaround, you could detect when the position of your text box (or its parent scroll viewer's offset) has changed, as this would indicate that the virtual keyboard has appeared or disappeared.
You can listen to the TextBox.GotFocus and TextBox.LostFocus events to detect when a text box in your application acquires and looses focus.
If an editable element gets focus then the framework will automatically scroll the element into view. So you really shouldn't have to do anything.
After creating a translucent window (based on example code by Matt Gemmell) I want to get keyboard events in this window. It seems that there are only keyboard events when my application is the active application while I want keyboard events even when my application isn't active but the window is visible.
Basically I want behavior like that provided by the Quicksilver application (by blacktree).
Does anybody have any hints on how to do this?
There are two options:
Use GetEventMonitorTarget() with a tacked-on Carbon run loop to grab keyboard events. Sample code is available on this page at CocoaDev.
Register an event trap with CGEventTapCreate. Sample code can be found in this thread from the Apple developer mailing list.
Edit: Note that these methods only work if you check off “Enable access for assistive devices” in the Universal Access preference pane.
A simpler route that may work better for you is to make your app background-only. The discussion on CocoaDev of the LSUIElement plist key explains how to set it up. Basically, your application will not appear in the dock or the app switcher, and will not replace the current application's menu bar when activated. From a user perspective it's never the 'active' application, but any windows you open can get activated and respond to events normally. The only caveat is that you'll never get to show your menu bar, so you'll probably have to set up an NSStatusItem (one of those icon menus that show up on the right side of the menu bar) to control (i.e. quit, bring up prefs, etc.) your application.
Edit: I completely forgot about the Non-Activating Panel checkbox in Interface Builder. You need to use an NSPanel instead of an NSWindow to get this choice. This setting lets your panel accept clicks and keyboard input without activating your application. I'm betting that some mix of this setting and the Carbon Hot Keys API is what QuickSilver is using for their UI.
Update:
Apple actually seems to have changed everything again starting with 10.5 BTW (I recently upgraded and my sample code did not work as before).
Now you can indeed only capture keydown events setting up an event tap if you are either root or assistive devices are enabled, regardless on which level you plan to capture and regardless if you selected to capture (which allows you to modify and even discard events) or to be listen only. You can still get information when flags have changed (actually even change these) and other events, but keydown under no other circumstances.
However, using the carbon event handler and the method RegisterEventHotKey() allows you to register a hotkey and you'll get notified when it is pressed, you neither need to be root for that nor do you need anything like assistive devices enabled. I think Quicksilver is probably doing it that way.