Is there any way to launch a program with a shortcut, that sets the process-priority of that program?
iTunes is dragging my system to it's knees, but when I set the process-priority to "low", somehow, like magic, Windows gets back to it's normal responsive self :)
You learn something new every day.
My answer was wrong, but since it was marked accepted I'm editing to be right.
Change your short cut to point to:
start /BELOWNORMAL iTunes.exe
Instead of just iTunes.exe
Related
I have a rather unusual question, namely, how is called this window from icon tray?
I would like to make it in my application, and I could not find his name. I would ask for some information, or the name, the rest I should have to deal with.
The Windows UX Guidelines don't say anything about it. From my perspective it's just a normal dialog, albeit one that has rather immediate actions (as opposed to first clicking on an OK button of sorts) and resides in a fairly small size in a specific location. It is meant to be opened, interacted with quickly and then dismissed, never being the center of your attention. If your idea fits those criteria as well, then go ahead. It's easy to recreate with standard means.
I've been searching for a mouse broadcaster for Mac for a while and it seems there are no solutions for doing this, so I must look for alternative solutions now. I'm wondering if AppleScript is capable of performing such a task. Basically, what I would like to do is read mouse position and action when performed in one application for as long as the script is active, and broadcast/replicate it in one or more other applications. Is AppleScript capable of this?
Just to clarify, I'd need to simulate mouse movement in the other applications... for example, if I opened up several instances of a drawing program, assuming that the program had the same resolution, anything I drew in the main program, would replicate on the other programs.
Really applescript cannot do what you need. It's not made for that. Applescript is made to run the commands in an application's applescript dictionary. I assume that the dictionary of the applications you want to control give you no way to read and control the mouse.
You do have an applescript alternative though. I have made a command line tool to read the mouse position and also to move the mouse. So theoretically you can do what you want with applescript and my tool. I do not believe you will get the results you expect though. Anyway you can try. Here's a link to the web page for my tool. I hope it helps.
Get it here.
Your basic approach could be 1) activate the application you want to read the mouse position, 2) run my tool in a repeat loop and record the mouse positions, 3) activate the second application that you want to duplicate the mouse movements, 4) use a repeat loop with my tool to make the mouse move according to how you recorded it.
There appears to be no documentation on this. I'd like an play an equivalent length animation while the keyboard is entering and exiting. Being even slightly off makes the animation look very awkward.
Thanks again.
As you say, it's not documented. I think the best choice you have is to start with a guess (400ms 300ms seems like a good start to me) and tweak it until the difference is unnoticable.
Updated: I thought you were referring to the menu animation time, not the keyboard.
I have a rather large routine which will can run for a couple of hours. Here and there it creates a figure, plots something to it and saves that Figure.
As I have only one PC, I would like to continue to work with that machine. The problem is that whenever a new figure is made, MATLAB becomes the active application again.
Is there any way to tell MATLAB or Windows that MATLAB should not be allowed to set itself to active?
I saw that one possibility is to run a MATLAB script totally in the background (like that). But that is a little bit too unsupervised, as I would like to be able to switch to the MATLAB window and check the output to the command window.
Any ideas? If there is a general solution for Windows that prevents that other Applications to become active would also be cool!
You can overload the figure function as following in order to prevent figure poping up:
a = figure('visible','off');
I hate to state the obvious, but you could always store the data you want to plot until the end.
Now, you're going to tell me that some of that data is subroutines and doesn't get passed back to the main routine. OK. So, the solution to that would be to write a "Store_Plot_Data" class with a method that would write into memory the data, the #plot_function_name (for 3D, scatter, etc.), the axis label strings, etc. Then you would create one instance of this class in your main routine and to ensure visibility of this one instance to all subroutines you could do any of the following:
use a global variable as your single instance ... OK, not so elegant,
implement the Singleton pattern, or
pass all subroutines the handle to that one instance of the "Store_Plot_Data" class.
If there is a general solution for Windows that prevents that other
Applications to become active would also be cool!
In Windows 7, this worked for me:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windowsxp/ht/stealingfocus02.htm
Set "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\ForegroundLockTimeout" to 30d40 (hex).
If you want all figures to not show.
set(0,'defaultFigureVisible','off');
In the beginning of your script do:
set(0, 'DefaultFigureVisible', 'off');
set(0, 'DefaultFigureWindowStyle', 'docked');
Dock the Matlab figure window and maximize any other application (Excel, Word etc.) you are working with in front of Matlab.
Then you can continue to work without being interrupted by figures blinking on your face.
I have the following (minor) problem that I want to solve programmatically. Whenever I unplug my secondary monitor from my laptop, every windows get moved to be visible in the now smaller resolution. When I plug my external monitor back in, I need to manually replace the windows to their correct position. I have to do that every morning (sigh).
Now I decided to write a simple command-line program that could save the position of every open windows and reposition them when I want to restore their positions.
I have managed to do something that works just fine by using the Accessibility API, which allows me to control windows that aren't part of my process space. I have a problem though: the program can only see the windows that are in my current space (I'm talking about the OSX Spaces feature here).
In other words, when I run my program to save the windows positions, it will only be able to save the positions of the windows in the space I'm currently in.
Some more details about my program:
It loops through all the processes running and get their PIDs.
It creates application elements from these PIDs (AXUIElementCreateApplication)
It gets the windows associated with this application, and then their positions
When getting the windows elements from the application element, the AXUIElementCopyAttributeValues only returns me the windows of the current space.
Now, is there a way to control any windows (across different spaces)? If not, I wouldn't mind programmatically changing spaces to get every windows, but that doesn't seem possible.
Any help would be appreciated!
I'm not aware of a documented way to switch spaces.
You probably want CGSPrivate.h - CGSSetWorkspace et al. Just keep in mind those functions are SPI and can break without warning even in a 10.6.x release.
If you want to avoid using private APIs you can take advantage of the fact Mission Control has keyboard shortcuts for moving to various spaces, and you can programmatically send the key codes to activate them. I wrote a blog post about it (http://ianyh.com/blog/2013/06/05/accessibility/) for a tiling window manager I've been working on called Amethyst, which has some example code you can check out in -[AMWindow moveToSpace:].
The short version is moving to a space looks something like using the default ctrl + arrow key to move to adjacent spaces:
CGEventRef keyboardDownEvent = CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent(NULL, kVK_RightArrow, true);
CGEventRef keyboardUpEvent = CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent(NULL, kVK_RightArrow, false);
CGEventSetFlags(keyboardDownEvent, kCGEventFlagMaskControl);
CGEventSetFlags(keyboardUpEvent, 0);
CGEventPost(kCGHIDEventTap, keyboardDownEvent);
CGEventPost(kCGHIDEventTap, keyboardUpEvent);
CFRelease(keyboardEvent);
CFRelease(keyboardEventUp);
You could combine this with NSWorkspaceActiveSpaceDidChangeNotification to traverse all spaces and gather window data.
Also, as a potentially interesting note the accessibility APIs can actually give you windows across all spaces at the same time, but it will only give you windows in spaces that you have traversed to since the process utilizing the APIs launched. I have no idea why this is the case, but it does seem to be.