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Topics - joshuawood [ switch to compact view ]

Pages: [1]
1
FARR Plugins and Aliases / System Tray plugin
« on: January 16, 2009, 08:37 PM »
Hi all,

Here's an alpha of a plugin I'm tried to put together. It lists the system tray apps you have running, and allows you to simulate mouse clicking them. Extract the zip to your plugins directory. You can activate it by typing "tray". Once an item is launched, it will bring up a menu asking which mouse button you wish to simulate. Under Vista, the menu hotkeys do not appear to be highlighted. You can press l for left click, r for right click, d for double click for a shortcut. The menu will appear where the mouse cursor is. I can make my menu appear wherever I like (I had it at the top of FARR at one stage), but the systray menu can only appear where the mouse is due to the way it works. I could however move the mouse to somewhere like the top of FARR, but some people might not like this, so I've opted to make my menu appear where the mouse is, as does the systray menu.

This is incomplete. There will surely be issues and bugs. Some that are known:

Under XP:
-Icons do not have transparency (they are in BMP format since Visual Studio has no ICO encoder, if anyone can help pls do).
-Network icons don't get their text sometimes. Eg LAN or Wireless. Retrying once or several more times will get it ok. So if you see something with no text, it will probably be a network icon. You can still access the functions are normal however.

Under Vista:
-Icons have transparency! Same format as above, so Vista must render something differently. And proper ICO format would still be best however.
-System icons such as volume, network, battery indicator are found in a different area of the tray. I'm not sure how to get these apps yet, if possible.

Under Se7en:
-Since the tray has changed a bit, those icons that are "hidden" in the up arrow section are not displayed by this plugin. However unlike Vista, the battery, volume, network indicators are correctly found (MS must have recombined the "split" tray sections Vista used).
-The mouse simulation doesn't work for all icons. Eg, left click on volume doesn't work, but does on battery.

Under all:
-Dunno how to get the clock, if possible.
-FARR tray app itself has issues with the icon for some reason. First time the plugin will get it ok, then other times fail. With my test app sometimes it will always fail, other times it will always get it; I haven't been able to reproduce the get once then not again issue. However, I'm sure it's to do with why I can sometimes never get it (exception is thrown). Currently I ignore the FARR icon to avoid this issue.
-You can't append search terms. Eg, you can't type "tray win" to find only tray apps with "win" in their name. This will come later, the SDK needs to be updated first I think.
-Some tray names will be funny, or possibly missing. I can't do anything about this, I can only relay the tooltip text of the tray app (no tooltip = no name).

Note: If you hear a "beep" once you type "tray", it indicates an error has occurred. I'm not sure why this sometimes happens. If it does, try the "no icon" build attached, and let me know if the "beep" goes away with that version.

Tested on XP Pro 32bit, Vista Home Premium 32bit with UAC off/on, Se7en Pro 32bit with UAC off. With UAC on it will not currently work if you load FARR normally. You need to run FARR "as administrator" for it to work.

This plugin has been tested on FARR 2.80.02 under Se7en only, but should work under other OSs ok. 64 bit OSs probably won't work, I couldn't figure out why.

Important credits:
// Hacked together by Joshua Wood, Jan 2009, from the following parts:
// Big thanks to vitalyb for his FARR C# SDK: https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=10992.0
// System Tray enumeration code (slightly modified) from Karl Wagner: http://www.aeroxp.or...ystem-tray-from-net/
// Big thanks to skajfes and mouser on donationcoder.com forums for their help
// Additional extras\coding by Joshua Wood

2
Find And Run Robot / Feature request: Access system tray icons
« on: December 31, 2008, 12:43 AM »
Hi,

Since FARR has done away with my start menu, I figured it would be nice to do away with the system tray also, be it natively in FARR or via plugin.

Here's how I'm thinking it would work:

Some alias, say "tray", would enumerate the tray icons and list them in the FARR results window. 2 user-definable hotkeys, one for left mouse click one for right, would trigger the assocaited tray menus, if available (ie, not all tray icons have left/right click options, some have both). Alternatively, you could simply left or right mouse click on the item, but that's somewhat defeating the use of FARR :)

So, you'd get your list and then press for eg, ctrl-fx for left click where fx is the function key corresponding to the desired tray icon in the results window. Or alt-fx for right click. It would then display the appropriate menu as it corresponds to that mouse click for that icon.

You could further refine the search results by for eg "tray <search term>" for those with more than 10 tray icons, where search term works like FARR's current search ability, including non-contiguous results.

This way you could hide most (all, if possible) tray icons but still easily and quickly access them, saving valuable taskbar real estate, esp for those of us on laptops with only 1280x800 screens.

Oh, and happy new year to all.

Regards,
Josh

3
Find And Run Robot / suggestion for keyword searching
« on: July 15, 2008, 06:23 PM »
Hi, I was wondering if there is any intention to implement searches like Launchy or other similar apps do. Best understood with an example as I'm not sure what search logic you'd call it:

If I want to search for "Mozilla Firefox" under FARR I need to type "fox". I could also find it with "f fox" or "m fox". With Launchy I can find it with "ffox" or "mfox" so it's searching over all the words in the title and is not fussed on spaces (although I note that "f fox" doesn't work).

It's just a little quicker and simplier than having to put spaces in... esp when, for eg with FARR, "m fox" makes sense but "f fox" doesn't, since "firefox" doesn't have a space in it.

This would be a great addition.

Edit: Good example here, they call it Fuzzy Text matching:
http://trydash.com/home/

Cheers,
Josh

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