Inactive Displays/Listening to Events

[djrikki]

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for your recent work on the AVCodec now supporting MP4A and AAC playback, your news item perked my interest no end. Great work as always.
Okay on to my wish.

Currently it is only possible for Hollywood applications to listen to mouse/keyboard events if the application is receiving focus i.e. the window is active. It would be cool if applications could be developed to listen to events when the application is not receiving focus/the window is not active. I realise this is most certainly opening a whole can of worms and I'll probably get a quick 'No' or a 'not do-able' style response from you pretty smart-ish! But I can most certainly 'wish' for it anyway!

Take this scenario for example under AmigaOS, we have this funky Mixer program, we have to install yet another application AllKeys in order to be able to send arexx commands via the keyboard to it in order to be able to adjust the master volume. What I'd love to do with Jack is, allow the user to configure the two keys that move the Volume Up/Down keys, when either key is pressed the arexx commands are sent to Mixer. At the same time I want to see a transparent overlay window (which I would program myself) as the keys are being pressed much like you would see in MacOS and certain MS Windows configurations.

At present the user can only be able to do this if first they select Jack's window making it active - from the POV of the end-user this isn't very user-friendly.

[airsoftsoftwair]

I understand that it would be a useful feature but it's not very likely to come because it would require lots of lowlevel programming because the OS' window manager never sends those events to inactive windows. Hollywood would have to hook into the event chain directly and that's all very lowlevel stuff.

[fingus]

Take this scenario for example under AmigaOS, we have this funky Mixer program, we have to install yet another application AllKeys in order to be able to send arexx commands via the keyboard to it in order to be able to adjust the master volume. What I'd love to do with Jack is, allow the user to configure the two keys that move the Volume Up/Down keys, when either key is pressed the arexx commands are sent to Mixer. At the same time I want to see a transparent overlay window (which I would program myself) as the keys are being pressed much like you would see in MacOS and certain MS Windows configurations.

you mean this:



I have done it back last year but its a bit buggy and it have allkeys, arexx and mixer dependencies.

[djrikki]

@fingus

Yes I am aware of the various options via third-party applications and solutions. The question is regarding whether it would be possible to do all this in Hollywood.

@andreas

The kinda answer I expected, a limitation in AmigaOS. Shame, but perfectly understandable.