I would like to have a layered window that is always-on-top, which I can accomplish, but there are certain screen elements that still get drawn over it, such as menus (including the start menu).
Is there any way to make a window or child window of my application have a high enough top-ness property that it will draw over another application's menus? Or is there something built in to windows that ensures that menus in the currently active application are always drawn on top?
In fact, I don't really understand all that well how menus work. So it might not even make any sense for me to try to make my window "act like a menu" in hopes of making it cover more things.
There's only one level of TopMost, you'll compete with any other program that insists on being top-most. Try osk.exe for example. I'm guessing it uses a WH_SHELL hook to win.
Related
I was looking at how sometimes when you right click, the menu goes outside of the window.
Is this implemented with a separate window? If so, how can I get this functionality. I am trying to use GLFW, but I understand if it isn't possible.
Currently I am on windows, but I like keeping my options open, which is why GLFW would be preferable.
I noticed that GLUT has such a feature. If you are confused to what I am looking at then look at that.
Thanks for any help!!
Overlapping menus (in MS Windows) have to be implemented as a new top-level window, you would have a new OpenGL rendering context and draw the menu in that space - yes, it's a fair bit of work all for the edge-case of a menu overspilling the parent window,
However this isn't often a problem in OpenGL programming because if you're working on a full-screen game then the menu will always be displayed within the main window, and even if it isn't a full-screen a game your users really won't notice them as games tend to use different UI concepts like radial-menus which wouldn't overspill the parent window.
Or if you're working on a non-game title, chances are it isn't full-screen and is going to be an OpenGL rendering area within a larger application that is rendered using a native UI toolkit (e.g. 3ds Max, AutoCAD, etc), in which case no problem: just use native menus.
You can, of course, use native menus in an OpenGL application anyway, provided you do the necessary plumbing for native window messages.
I have a general question on how to develop an image viewer plugin with Firebreath. For that, I would like to incorporate a GUI framework, like wxwidget or Qt. The GUI would be used to to fire up some dialogs, adding a toolbar on top, or to open context menus with right clicking an image.
As far as I understand I have a hwnd handle and so I can draw onto a window. I also understand that I have various events I can react on, like mouse button clicks or keyboard strokes. But it fails me how I would add graphical menus, buttons, etc. I know I could use html around the window but that's not the route I like to take.
For instance, does it makes sense to render an user interface offline (in memory) onto an image and then keep somehow track of the state internally?
Has anyone done such thing? Or can anyone give me some insight on how to accomplish adding a user interface.
Assuming you only care about windows and assuming that you don't mind using a windowed plugin, which is the easiest (but no HTML elements can float over the plugin), it should be no different than creating a GUI in any other windows application.
You are given a window that shows up with the AttachedEvent; when DetachedEvent is fired you need to stop using the window. Many people create a child window inside that parent window and use that for all their actual real code which makes it a little easier to use one of those other abstractions, but that's basically all there is to it. I don't know specifically how you'd do it with QT or wxwidget but you'd create a child window of that HWND that you are given and have the abstraction do your thing for you.
As to whether or not it would be rendering things offscreen, etc, I have no idea; that would totally depend on the window system. There is no reason that I know of that you would need to do that, and most things just draw directly to the HWND, but there are a zillion different ways you could do it. It looks to me like what you really need is to understand how drawing in Windows actually works.
I hope that helps
I'm trying to figure out how to create a graphical interface, in X11, which exists outside of a window manager's/desktop environment's standard window frame. For example, when Thunderbird finds new mail, it shows a special alert in the lower right hand corner of the screen which is shown without any frame (no close/minimize buttons, etc.).
I'm specifically interested in doing this in QT with C++, but if someone knows a solution with a different graphical library, that would be helpful too.
For QT pass Qt::FramelessWindowHint as a window flag when you construct your top level widget.
See here for more info:
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/main-snapshot/qt.html#WindowType-enum
You can do this with X as well although I haven't done so in a long time.
http://www.xfree86.org/current/XCreateWindow.3.html
With GTK you would use gtk_window_set_decorated(), which would probably be Gtk::Widget->set_decorated() (I think, I don't use gtkmm).
http://developer.gnome.org/gtkmm/unstable/classGtk_1_1Window.html#a67adb1d8051a38e0e5272f141bb8778c
I've seen things like this and I was wondering if this was possible, say I run my application
and it will show the render on whatever is below it.
So basically, rendering on the screen without a window.
Possible or a lie?
Note: Want to do this on windows and in c++.
It is possible to use your application to draw on other application's windows. Once you have found the window you want, you have it's HWND, you can then use it just like it was your own window for the purposes of drawing. But since that window doesn't know you have done this, it will probably mess up whatever you have drawn on it when it tries to redraw itself.
There are some very complicated ways of getting around this, some of them involve using windows "hooks" to intercept drawing messages to that window so you know when it has redrawn so that you can do your redrawing as well.
Another option is to use clipping regions on a window. This can allow you to give your window an unusual shape, and have everything behind it still look correct.
There are also ways to take over drawing of the desktop background window, and you can actually run an application that draws animations and stuff on the desktop background (while the desktop is still usable). At least, this was possible up through XP, not sure if it has changed in Vista/Win7.
Unfortunately, all of these options are too very complex to go in depth without more information on what you are trying to do.
You can use GetDesktopWindow(), to get the HWND of the desktop. But as a previous answer says (SoapBox), be careful, you may mess up the desktop because the OS expects that it owns it.
I wrote an open source project a few years ago to achieve this on the desktop background. It's called Uberdash. If you follow the window hierarchy, the desktop is just a window in a sort of "background" container. Then there is a main container and a front container. The front container is how windows become full screen or "always on top." You may be able to use Aero composition to render a window with alpha in the front container, but you will need to pass events on to the lower windows. It won't be pretty.
Also, there's a technology in some video cards called overlays/underlays. You used to be able to render directly to an overlay. Your GPU would apply it directly, with no interference to main memory. So even if you took a screen capture, your overlay/underlay would not show up in the screen cap. Unfortunately MS banned that technology in Vista...
I want my application window to be in a certain spot in the window hierarchy. That is, say I have 3 windows on my desktop. At the very bottom I have Word, the window on top of word is explorer, and the active foreground window is itunes. I want to place my application window on top of word but beneath explorer. How can I achieve this with win32?
You might be able to use SetWindowPos - look at the hWndInsertAfter parameter. I'm not sure if this will work across process boundaries, but it's worth a shot. Perform this after your window is created but before you make it visible.
This is most likely not possible, because you will get caught by the code that tries to prevent focus stealing - it might work if your app initially has focus and you try to give it away (i.e. you are on top, then you try to hide behind the Explorer window)
If you want to maintain this arrangement, the simplest way is to create your window specifying Words window as your parent
Otherwise SetwindowPos is the all purpose worker for controlling a windows position, visibility and depth. But any z-ordering performed here will obviously be lost as soon as the user actually starts switching tasks.
One thing to watch out for: windows always raises the active window to the top of the z-order, and likewise, activates any window that is moved to the top of the z-order. There are restrictions however :- to prevent all manner of irritating behaviour Windows prevents applications from stealing activation without a user interaction - which means that, if word is currently the active window, SetWindowPos to place yourself above Word will only succeed if your app is allowed to take activation at that time.