Posts tagged "OnTopReplica"

Did you ever want to watch a movie on your PC while actually working? Human multitasking, so to speak?

Well, thanks to the DWM Thumbnail APIs of Windows Vista I was finally able to create a little application that does exactly what I always dreamed of: it let's you clone a window of your choice, thus keeping it "always on top" as a small real-time thumbnail. I'm new publishing version 1.0 as a preview (it has some quirks still... I learned how hard it is to proportionally resize a window ), but it should work fine in most cases. Check it out on its dedicated page and enjoy!

"On Top Replica", the small application that I published on this site two months ago, has been updated (you will receive the update automatically if you installed it via OneClick) and has also been re-released with an open source licence on CodePlex.com.

The DWM Library on which the application is based has been released on CodePlex as well.

Check it out if you're interested and feel free to contact me for any feedback. If you simply want to install the application instead or need a short guide, please refer to the page on this website.

Busy week! Exams are approaching and I keep working on my useless side-projects when I should be studying...

Anyway, I found the time to update my pet project "OnTopReplica". You can download it directly from this site (it should update itself automatically). Enjoy!

And by the way, I learned some really interesting stuff about application settings and XML serialization: I'll post it soon.

Today I released an incremental update of OnTopReplica (reaching version number 1.3.1). No radical feature changes this time, just some fixes and improvements to how thumbnails are resized, how regions are defined and handled, and so on. Hope you enjoy it.

As usual, source code and binaries are released on the CodePlex project page.

I'm back from a couple of exams at Unive and spent a couple of days working on my little side project "OnTopReplica". After some code refactoring, some neat additions and a completely rewritten (and definitely more usable) region selector, I ended up with what I think could be worthy of a major release: 2.0!

By the way, OnTopReplica has been recently featured on Softpedia, therefore I'll have a larger audience to satisfy now... (that is, larger than "my brother and I").

Please check it out if you haven't already and let me know! Source code is available as always on CodePlex.com and it's definitely less messy this time.

This evening I pulled together the last updates to my side project OnTopReplica and published it under version 2.1.

The update contains two nice features: first of all you can now adjust the opacity of the window by turning the mouse wheel. This also makes possible to set the opacity in finer increments than through the default menu.

Additionally, the fullscreen mode has been completely overhauled and now adapts much more nicely to the screen (in fact it now leaves the taskbar free and doesn't cover potential notifications). There's also a new click-through mode (you can enable it in the "resize" menu and by setting the window opacity to non-opaque) which transforms the default fullscreen mode into an "overlay" mode: the window will sit in the foreground as usual, but you will be able to click on every window underneath. Very cool to watch movies in full resolution!

Hope you like it! Download it here.

I recently got an e-mail from an OnTopReplica user (they exist! ) asking for a new feature that allows clicking on the window's thumbnail in order to generate corresponding clicks on the window that is being cloned. It's a feature I would find quite useful myself, therefore I'm currently wasting lots of time I should be using to prepare my exams to work on the next version of OnTopReplica: 2.5.

Somehow, it's strange that a seemingly "interesting" things like the generation of fake clicks on an arbitrary window (using the Win32 APIs) appearently isn't talked about at all on the internet. So, instead of blatantly stealing some code from someone else, I had to find the way to do what I wanted by digging around in the Win32 documentation. I'm not completely sure the following code is correct, but it works (mostly).

More...

Today I released OnTopReplica 2.5: if you installed it via ClickOnce you should receive the update automatically. The version on CodePlex.com will be updated soon as well.

This new version includes some minor changes: for instance, the opacity of the window can't be changed anymore by using the mouse wheel (I found it extremely annoying, but tell me if you found the feature useful). A new interesting feature, which was suggested by Young Do via mail, is "click forwarding": if enabled, OnTopReplica will send fake mouse clicks on the window that is being cloned when you left click on the thumbnail. I'm starting to use it on Youtube videos and it's definitely very useful.

This new version is fully localized. At the moment, english and italian are the only languages included in the default install, but additional translations can be added in no time. If you'd enjoy making OnTopReplica more useful for other users around the world, send my an e-mail.

I recently received a bug report on OnTopReplica, because it did render incorrectly when in High DPI mode. Some UI elements did slip beyond the window boundaries or were misaligned.

Even if Windows Forms simplifies high DPI mode the problem (Control instances have a special AutoScaleMode property that automatically adapts your UI based on the system font size or the DPI mode), you still must be certain to never ever use constant pixel values in your code.

Essentially, the code that handled the opening and closing of the "region" side box did increase (or decrease) the width of the form of a constant value (which I tought would always match the size of the region box control). Unfortunately, Windows Forms would automatically adapt the size of said control, thus making it bigger than expected. The solution is quite easy: simply drop every constant value and always refer to the actual size of each control (in Control.Size and Control.ClientSize).

The new version can be downloaded now via ClickOnce. As seen in the screenshot above, OnTopReplica 2.6 now also includes a "chrome less" mode that will remove the classic window borders (and make the application unresizable, even if it can still be moved). Should be much nicer for videos and similar.

Unfortunately, while publishing the new version I discovered that the original license I used to sign the ClickOnce manifest had expired last month (this means OnTopReplica was first published with ClickOnce around one year ago, woot! ). I had to sign it with a new key: should you encounter manifest or license problems when updating the application, please update .NET to version 3.5 SP1, which should fix all manifest problems.

Yesterday I released an update for OnTopReplica, which now reaches version 2.7.

I fixed a couple of things here and there (especially some localization issues), the region selection screen now draws two guides that should help you to crop the right portion of the screen more easily and some bugs with the auto-positioning have been fixed (now the cloned window correctly docks in the corner of the active monitor).

Other small changes: enabling and disabling the "chrome" works better (the clone window stays centered and doesn't move on its own), the [ALT]+[ENTER] combination to switch to/from fullscreen has been added and finally, in fullscreen mode, OnTopReplica will not be a top-level window anymore. This sounds kind of strange, but now you can watch movies in fullscreen, pull up an instant messaging window (or something like that) and write while you continue watching the big movie on the background.

That's all, I think. Get it now while it's fresh!