Taskbar 5 BETA
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Requirements
- FreeMiNT + XaAES. Will possibly work under MyAES as well, please
test and let me know.
- A colour screenmode. Mono is currently not supported.
- 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.
- 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.
In the top left there's two icons, one for closing the start menu window
and one to pin it to the screen. If it's pinned then it won't automatically
close when you select a program/file or the mouse leaves the menu. It can
also be freely positioned on the screen by dragging it by the title bar.
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.
Other stuff
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.
Please note that due to
a bug in recent versions of XaAES the detection of the topped application
is a bit crippled in this version. If the top application has no open windows
it's button on the taskbar will not indicate that it's topped.
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.
Disclaimer
I've been using this program on my Falcon060 with MiNT/XaAES for
months without issues. However, that does not mean it works flawlessy on
your system. I strongly recommend having memory protection enabled
when testing/using this software!