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IDEA: Truely "Live" Taskbar Thumbnails Previews for Vista

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WhiteLion:
I do have that live previews enabled under Vista and the only truly live Shot it shows is of the activated window.

To understand what I mean, you need to start up say 2 games with action on screen.

Minimize 1 and keep the other focused.

Now, look at the taskbar thumbnails.

The activated game’s preview is a true "live" shot and shows game movement/stat changes.

The minimized game’s preview shot shows only a capture from the second you had minimized it.

In static apps such has Office you would never notice that minimized window is an old screenshot not an actual live preview.

So you must load 2 games with constant movement and changes to see what truly I mean.

To catch you up to speed, I am running 7 games concertly and pulling 98% Cpu usage daily and constantly.

I have to focus on each game individually to see what the current status of my individual characters are, to know if it’s time to restock items in my store, see how much $$'s I made and if my pet is starving or not.

However, when I switch game focus there is a high chance that 1 or 2 of the games will jam. Turn unresponsive and black screen.

Yet that character is still online and their store is still operational. I know because I can view the store with another separate character in another instance of the game, but that 1 instance of game is blacked out only on my end.

Really weird. IF I had a true live capture view of all minimized windows it would be a true heaven sent blessing to me.

I have searched, searched & again searched with now more & more refined terms and the only thing that even sounds promising again & again is Visual Task Tips http://www.visualtasktips.com/.

I found yet another newer version, it swears to work on Vista and also says it would be silly to use it on Vista at the sametime, since Vista does have the capability built-in. It installs fine but, when I run the app on Vista64 it does absoutely nothing except sits pretty in the taskbar and lets me adjust it’s settings, to no avail.

I did use Visual Task Tips avidly at one point under XP and it worked very well, but I don’t remember nor realized if it was true "live" shots or not, at the time. Also, I wasn’t gaming back then and would have never noticed.

I do know there is an ALT-TAB wannabee "improvement" to Vista’s built-in one that is supposed to show live pre-views & was orginally made for XP. It’s not what I want, but I can settle for even that. However, again the only true "live" shot it shows is that of the active window.

I know Skrommel(sp?) had made a dual monitor app
which showed the other monitor's open apps on the current
monitor which you are using. My PC back then was not powerful enough to run it, flawlessly.

I do still have dual monitors and such an app that Skrommel has already made comes sooo close to what I need ;)

The problem with making this puppy for me is that I am running on 64bit.

Hehe...but I do fully have this new of quad of mine set to boot in auto mode to over-ride the driver signing thingy ;p

Please, I am begging, make a full Truely Live Thumbnail Preview for Vista's Taskbar. Or even some sort of a Live Desktop Viewer of minimized windows which works on 64-bit Vista. I do fully realize and expect such an app to be somewhat CPU intensive.


Keep Rockin,

WL

jgpaiva:
Well.. I'm not sure if this can be done.
Vista does have live preview, if open 2 movies at a time, hovering over the taskbar buttons displays both of them moving.
The problem is that when apps are minimized, they "hide" the visual part, to use less resources.
Can't you run the games windowed?

WhiteLion:
Vista does have live preview, if open 2 movies at a time, hovering over the taskbar buttons displays both of them moving.
--- End quote ---

During my searching, I did stubble across a few mentions of that. It has something to do with Media Player being fired up and works specifically for with/that.

I do not run the games in full screen mode, still each instantance does take a large amount of screen space. The game is an online one. There's only 2 choices full screen or almost full screen but draggable and not cursor responsive resizable because the game simply does not allow it to happen. Keeping all 7 instances open with dual monitors does not allow me to view each one's individual current status, without switching window focus. I have 1 widescreen & 1 17-inch monitor hooked up. It's impossible and I have done more then tried.
If I could somehow resize those windows it would be highly possible, but I can not. 

Having the ability to resize these game windows would be a semi-satisfactory solution to what I really want. It would be a livable solution but not a very convenient one.

A better solution would be something with a windowed interface that can show a true live preview of each minimized app inside. It would be super awesome.

The only thing that could top that, is a true live taskbar preview.

Thanks for your super fast reply.


Hugz,

WL

jgpaiva:
Vista does have live preview, if open 2 movies at a time, hovering over the taskbar buttons displays both of them moving.
--- End quote ---
During my searching, I did stubble across a few mentions of that. It has something to do with Media Player being fired up and works specifically for with/that.
-WhiteLion (August 18, 2008, 04:58 AM)
--- End quote ---
Not exactly. It works with all applications, as long as they are not minimized. Try going to this site and hovering over the taskbar button of your browser, you'll see the animation there.

I do not run the games in full screen mode, still each instantance does take a large amount of screen space. The game is an online one. There's only 2 choices full screen or almost full screen but draggable and not cursor responsive resizable because the game simply does not allow it to happen. Keeping all 7 instances open with dual monitors does not allow me to view each one's individual current status, without switching window focus. I have 1 widescreen & 1 17-inch monitor hooked up. It's impossible and I have done more then tried.
-WhiteLion (August 18, 2008, 04:58 AM)
--- End quote ---
What I meant was that you can keep them all in windowed mode, and not minimize them, and then just see their previews in the taskbar.

Also, you may want to give VideoInPicture a try, it might be adequate for your situation. Unfortunately, it's still a bit buggy :(

VideoInPicture:
I was going to come in here and suggest http://videoinpicture.wikidot.com/ but I see that jgpaiva has beaten me to the punch. I think it might work for your needs but there are some quirks about it that you need to know. I haven't worked on the program for quite a while because I originally wrote it for myself so that I could watch online videos in the Window size that I wanted. It works for me and I run it every time I watch an online video.

From past users, I know it works in 64-bit Windows. Currently, the program will only show resized, live preview thumbnails on the primary monitor of your screen (no multi-monitor support). You may experience a slight slow down in your system for an unknown reason. I think having many live thumbnails in a resizable Window taxes your GPU although not your CPU. It isn't polished, but it works.

jgpaiva, what other bugs have you experienced?

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