Applications without frames

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yereverluvinuncleber
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Applications without frames

Post by yereverluvinuncleber »

Is it possible to create applications without traditional frames?

Applications for example that are heavily skinned and have a transparent background?

Examples:

Image
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doublemax
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Re: Applications without frames

Post by doublemax »

Not quite. You can have any bitmap as shape (check the "shaped" sample that comes with wxWidgets) and you can have the whole thing semi-transparent. But you can not have some parts transparent and other parts opaque.
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yereverluvinuncleber
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Re: Applications without frames

Post by yereverluvinuncleber »

Does that mean an object's opacity can be reduced to 1 out of 255 (or similar) so it is virtually invisible? The background too. No frame, close, minimise buttons at all

Can such an object have a click-through so it does not respond to a click and in fact the click goes to any underlying object including the desktop?
No point in having no-frame apps if a hidden background prevents click-throughs to underlying desktop objects such as icons, shortcuts &c.

Another example of one my desktop apps:
Image

The opacity and the click-through ability can make or break an app like this.
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doublemax
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Re: Applications without frames

Post by doublemax »

There are two different things:

A "shaped" frame like it's called in wxWidgets is possible. That's a borderless and captionless frame which shape is determined by a bitmap. There is no per-pixel alpha though. Pixels are either on or off.

On top of that you can set a transparency from 0-255 for the whole frame. This works with all frames, not only "shaped" ones.

But there is no click-through. The frame reacts to mouse clicks inside the shape like a normal frame. This could be accomplished under Windows with platform specfic code (mouse hook). I don't know about other platforms.
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yereverluvinuncleber
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Re: Applications without frames

Post by yereverluvinuncleber »

Thankyou, that is very useful.

I was thinking about using Wxbasic as it is a familiar dialect and the examples to create an app. seemed clear enough. I am looking for a language/environment to migrate my mini apps to, currently javascript, XML and png objects with a great deal of transparency.

This is a link to my mini-apps that shows you what I am looking to migrate:
http://lightquick.co.uk/steampunk-widge ... Itemid=264

They run on the desktop, were multi platform (Windows and OS/X), have clickthrough when/where they are completely transparent.

In my search I have not found a multi-platform environment that allows re-use of my VB-style code that is flexible enough to take over the mantle of the old desktop widget engines with the above characteristics. Tried a few now with little success. Seems that the transparency of frames, backgrounds is an issue for most. I suspect Wxbasic isn't going to be the one for me, not for now.
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