Taskbar 5 BETA
Current beta: Taskbar 5 beta 3
New: Fixed document history menu under N.AES.
Older betas:
Taskbar 5 beta 2
New: Works with N.AES 2 and MyAES as well as XaAES. Better support for mono. Bugfixes.
Please note that the betas only read and save configuration files in the same folder as taskbar.prg, so they will not interfere with your existing Taskbar setup.
Requirements
- FreeMiNT + XaAES, N.AES 2 or MyAES.
- A properly installed AV-server.
- Some RAM to spare. Taskbar will use 400+ Kb of RAM, depending on the size of your icons file.
- Recommended: Keyboard Tweaks.
Start menu
Apart from various bugfixes the major difference from the last release is the new start menu. It is now in a window, and has several "panels".To the left is a vertical row of icons. From the bottom to the top:
- Shutdown/reset.
- Start TosWin2 shell.
- Launch search tool specified by the $FINDER environment variable.
- Drives popup-menu.
- Home - open your $HOME folder.
- System - open the $SYSDIR folder.
- Startmenu - the traditional, hierarchial start-menu built from Thing! group files. NB! Submenus not supported under N.AES due to an N.AES bug.
- Documents - shows the 20 last opened files. The files listed here comes from various sources:
- The DHST protocol, as in previous versions of Farmer.
- Any files passed to an application by dragging it to it's Taskbar button or startmenu entry.
- Any files passed to an application on it's command line.
Right next to this icon panel is the main start menu panel.
Main start menu panel
Taskbar automatically detects any started application, and adds it to it's internal list of available applications. If the application already exists in this list, it's entry in the list is updated with the last start-up time and the start counter is incremented. This allows Taskbar to show you a list of the most recently used/most frequently used (depending on setting) applications. Besides this it will also add the files shown in the documents menu to this list/"database".You can also search this list by simply typing when the start menu is opened. It will show the first 20 matches from the list in the search order specified. To select sorting/order click on the button at the top of the list.
Right click on any item in the list for some options:
- Details: Opens a dialog showing some details about the file.
- Open location: Opens the directory containing the item.
- Clear statistics: Resets the start counter and start time for this file. This basically puts it a the bottom of the list.
- Ignore statistics: Start count and -time will never be updated for this file. So while it will be searchable, it will always be at the bottom of the list regardless of how many times it's started.
- Remove from list: Delete it from the list. The next time it's started or opened it will automatically be added again.
Start menu configuration
Right click on the start button and select "Configuration" to configure the start menu.- Title: The name/title of the start button. Leave it empty to only show the icon. If it starts with a $, the title will be interpreted as an environment variable and the value of this variable will be shown. E.g. "$HOST" will show the hostname.
- Save startmenu position: Taskbar will remember the position and state of the start menu. If the start menu is pinned when Taskbar exits, it will automatically be reopened at the same position at the next start.
- Prune at exit: When you exit Taskbar any files/applications that no longer exists will be removed from the application/file list. Can potentially slow down exit a little bit if there's a lot of files in the list.
- Clear: Will delete the entire application/file list.
- Search options
- Starts with: Search will match files that starts with your search string.
- Contains: Search will match files that contains your search string.
- Case sensitive: Search is case sensitive.
- Name: Search in application/file *titles* only. I.e. the nicenames given by the application's menu_register() call or the alias defined in Taskbar.
- Name and filename: Will also search in the actual filenames. So both "inter" and "intr" will return "Interface", since the filename for Interface is "intrface.prg".
- Documents: Include documents in the search. The Documents menu only shows the 20 last opened documents, but the list/database includes all files that has been shown in that menu.
Taskbar configuration
Right click on an application button and select "Configure" to configure how it appears on the taskbar.- Use defaults: Ignore all settings for this application.
- Don't display in Taskbar: Same as dragging it's button to the trashcan. The application will not be shown on the taskbar.
- Display icon only: Don't display the name, just the icon. Saves space on the taskbar, nice for "alway on" stuff like the control panel, desktop, control panel etc.
- Select icon: Select icon for this application. If not selected then the defaul application is used.
- Nick: Specify your own name to be displayed for this application.
- Autostart. This menu has three options:
- None
- Pinned. Button is always displayed, even when the application is not running. Clicking on the button will launch the application. Currently broken and not available.
- Autostart: This program will be automatically started when Taskbar starts. This replaces the "autostart" group in the old start menu.
- Options panel:
- Autohide: The taskbar will be displayed when the mouse pointer touch the bottom of the screen. As soon as the mouse leaves the taskbar it will be hidden again.
- Autotop: The taskbar window is topped when the mouse pointer touch the bottom of the screen.
- Always on top (XaAES and MyAES): The taskbar window is always shown on top of other windows, even when it doesn't have focus. NB! This is a little used feature in XaAES and not 100% stable. I would not recommend using it.
- Togglemode: Topping an application by clicking on it's button will hide all other applications. Useful in small resolutions.
- Show accs: Accessories are shown on the taskbar.
- Show date: Today's date is shown on the taskbar.
- Show time: A clock is displayed on the taskbar.
- Help bubbles: Will show online help if BubbleGEM functionality is present. NB! Has not been updated in this beta and is of little use. Better to leave this off.
- Appearance panel:
- Font select: Select font and font size if a FONTSELECT fontselector is present (Thing!, Teradesk, DragFont...). Any font size is in theory (!) supported.
- Raised buttons: Display the buttons in a 3D/oldschool style.
- Display icons: If cicons.rsc is available Taskbar will display icons in the application buttons if this option is selected. See below.
- Set colours: Specify the colours of the application names for the different button categories. Select category in the dropdown.
- Position panel:
- Align: Select whether the taskbar should be left-, right- or center-aligned at the bottom of the screen.
- Size: Select the width of the taskbar in percentage of the screen width.
This beta version does not look in $HOME for configuration files, only in the folder it's started from. So if you're an existing Taskbar user and want to use your Thing! groupfile based startmenu then copy your Index.grp to the same folder as this beta.
Icons
Icons will be available when the RSC file "cicons.rsc" is available in the same directory as taskbar.prg. Taskbar will search this file for colour icons, and all colour icons that is 48x48 pixels or less AND has a title will be available for selection in the application configuration dialog.The current icon rsc is just a collection of random 16x16 icons for testing.