Does anyone know if it's possible to get a Win32 application to run under wine / crossover but have the main toolbar appear as a Mac toolbar (i.e. outside the wine / crossover app)?
What is the "main toolbar"? In Win32, windows do not require a menu bar (ie: IE), or even a main window (!) so this is obviously not possible in general. If you really wanted to, you could send GetMenu() to the first created window, then use (something like? I haven't used the menu APIs much) GetMenuItemInfo() to fill the mac toolbar whenever the app gains focus, but I think this would be a lot of work for an 80% at best solution, not to mention I wouldn't know where to start to integrate this with WINE or crossover.
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I want to create a desktop widget (windows 10) with JavaFX. Is there any way to keep the window behind all others on the desktop? Also how to prevent it to minimize when clicking the show desktop button, or at least notice it.
After a bit of research it seems to be impossible at the moment to do this with java, although it is possible with the win32api and c++.
I want to make my own window manager for OS X, or at least give it the appearance of a new one. I have many designs written down in a book, and would like to implement them. These include altering, or even completely removing, menu bars, creating entirely new guis for switching applications, etc.
I know that OS X does not have a window manager, and that basically the functions that an X11 window manager would perform are done by Carbon, Cocoa, the Dock application, and the window server. I've read that it would take an incredible amount of reverse engineering to write my own api, etc. at the hardware level. I am still not that good at programming though, and don't have that kind of time. That's why I was thinking of maybe running an application on top of OS X that will function like a separate window manager - and do everything that the normal OS GUI / window manager would do.
Is this possible? For example: making a custom button that would appear upon a certain key combination, that could be clicked to access a document viewer, change the time, minimize a window, etc. Is there some way to access functionality to basic tasks / actions like this without using the default OS X button controls, and implementing them with my own GUI? I am talking about more than a simple theme change, I want to completely change the user experience. This means that this application would be run in a full screen mode that blocks out default OS X menu bars.
I've heard something about using graphics architectures to plug in your own window manager? Would this be an option too? If so, how would I go about doing that?
How can a Delphi XE application show a popup menu inside another application's window? The idea is for a helper-type app, running in the background. On a registered hotkey the application needs to display a popup menu near the text caret or mouse cursor.
Applications that do that are common, here's a menu created by AutoHotkey and displayed in a text editor:
I guess what I'm asking is: how can I display a popup menu at an arbitrary screen location, without it being attached to a Delphi control?
Create a TPopupMenu with the appropriate menu items. When you need to show it simply call Popup passing the top left position in screen coordinates.
PopupMenu1.Popup(X, Y);
#DavidHeffernan answered your question, but you might not have asked the right question.
Let's take the example you gave: the user is running some arbirary application, and you want to be able to detect a hotkey, display a menu, and then take some action based on the menu item chosen (and maybe even the user's context, such as the word under the cursor). This is more complicated than simply displaying a menu at arbitrary screen coordinates.
My recommendation is to use AutoHotKey instead of trying to replicate this in some other programming language. In case you're not aware of this, it is possible for your code to run AutoHotKey scripts. IIRC, you can compile AHK scripts, so you wouldn't need to install AHK, just the compiled scripts. AHK may not be the most elegant of solutions, but it has depth and maturity.
If this is not possible, then I suggest you research Windows Hooks and DLL Injection. Unless you can find some preexisting code or framework, this will entail quite a bit of work.
The reason for this complexity? To augment another program smoothly (without running into problems with focus, etc.) you want to have your code run as part of that other program. The mechanics of this can be done via DLL injection. However, that's only the first step. Once your code is running in the right context, then your code has to inter-operate with the "host" program. This can be tricky (it helps if you have deep experience with Windows messaging and the Windows API). If you want this to work smoothly with any arbitrary program, it gets even harder.
I just used this feature for the first time - in MS One Note 2010, click on the "Dock to Desktop" button.
The application then literally docks itself to the bottom of the screen. If a window is maximized above it, that window will not overlap or underlap it - the One Note window has become similar to the task bar in terms of its fixed usage of screen real estate.
Come to think of it, I've seen this one other place: the Windows 7 magnifier.
I'm curious to know how this is pulled off? Is it a window attribute that can be applied in a WinForms app or might I have to use the Windows API/C++ to do it? Or is it even trickier than that?
It probably uses SHAppBarMessage; example & a vb6 article simply because it has an illustration.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144177(VS.85).aspx
You will probably have a lot of trouble doing this with WinForms, but it might be possible -- probably, you'll have to do a lot of low level WinAPI stuff with PInvoke to make it work.
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.