Need help with sidebar app

[mindstitchdr]

Hey guys, I need a little help. My SideBar app is finally working the way I wanted with 2 exceptions.

Problem 1: When you right click on the shortcut to assign an image or shortcut path, the pop up dialog is centered on the app making it cut in half by the edge of the screen. I currently just manually move the dialog. I used the AMSPrettyDialogs dll to make the dialog and I'm not sure if there is a way to center the dialog on the screen.

Problem 2: I've place the shortcut to the app in the Startup folder, but when the app launches it is just a black box. If you move your mouse around the box the images appear. This only happens when launched on System Startup.

Any ideas?

[RizlaUK]

I used the AMSPrettyDialogs dll to make the dialog and I'm not sure if there is a way to center the dialog on the screen.

wow, peps still useing this.......might inspire a update soon then

ok, as far as i can remember (without looking at the source) i did not add a option to center on screen, although most of my dialog dll since then i did add this option

AMSPrettyDialogs was my first real dll for AMS, it could use some more options and i will update it soon as i have some cool dialogs i can add

the standard AMS dialog will always center on screen, maybe that will help for now

[mindstitchdr]

Hey RizlaUK. It would be great if you could update that for me. Thanks again for all the hard work you put into helping us mortals. HAHA :lol

[FoxLeader]

Hello!

Just to say I tried it and it kept flickering from the right of monitor 1 to the left of monitor two... (I run a dual display). Screen 1 is 1680*1050 and 2 is 1152*864.

Hope that can help a bit

Other than that it seemed cool, but I wasn't able to really use it because of that bug.

[mindstitchdr]

Sorry I forgot to mention that it is setup to run on 1024 x 768

[Protocol]

I did a couple of sidebar tests a while back and though I haven't taken a look at your program yet, you might consider having the math work out so that it's moveable, but "snaps" in place if placed within 5 pixels or so from the edge of the screen. Again, sorry for not taking a look at the code before posting, but I thought I'd throw that out there as it worked great and took minimal effort code-wise.

[mindstitchdr]

Problem 2: I've place the shortcut to the app in the Startup folder, but when the app launches it is just a black box. If you move your mouse around the box the images appear. This only happens when launched on System Startup.

Any ideas?

Does anybody have any ideas as to why this happens. Other than this and the centering of the dialogs (Hopefully RizlaUK can update the dll for me) everything works like I have intended.

[RizlaUK]

have you tried making the application redraw, a long shot but put in on show "Page.Redraw()" to force a refresh of the page

[Protocol]

As far as the startup goes, this shouldn't be a problem, but you say it only occures when placed there? If this is true (and it loads fine when executed manually), then it could be some sort of resource issue since this would all be happening while the system is still getting up to speed. I've used the startup area on several projects and haven't had a problem with it. Are you using a mask? If Rizla's method doesn't fix it, you might try leaving the background blank and loading in a background-sized image on StartUp. If not just to test it.

At first I thought you were talking about centered text within the dialogs and I would LOVE this. I can't tell you how time-consuming it is to center (with spaces) hundreds of dialogs, just to redo them when someone has a change in verbiage.

Doh!

[mindstitchdr]

Ok guys I might have figured this out but I have no idea how to fix it. This problem only occurs if the app was running when the system was shut down. If you close the app, then shut down the system, the app works fine on system startup. If the app is running when system was shut down, the problem happens everytime. I added the "Page.Redraw()" to the OnShow which did help with the ComboBox drawing the down arrow, but it didn't help with the redraw issue on startup.

[Protocol]

I would say that it's an issue with residual AMS files being left in the temp directory since your project didn't have a chance to clean out it's resources during its "application exit" process (just a theory here). Needless to say, from one PC user to another, I wouldn't suggest the "pull the plug" method of shutdown , but do I understand that this is a possible issue that can happen, so as far as work-arounds go, I would suggest exploring your temp folder while the application is running.

To do this place in an OpenFile line with the target file being "_TempFolder". This will show give you access to the directory that AMS places it's temp files in (including your project's source code). You may want to look at what's going on in that folder (what type of files IR places there and in which folders) and do a "FileDeleteOnReboot" function at the launch of your application. Naturally, there are different folders for different types of users and IR generates different folder names for new instances of the program running, but your reference to the Temp Directory would be tied to the user from which it was launched anyway and you IR uses the same type of folder-naming scheme, so you can safely seek and delete IR folders as needed to make your app function more clearly after a crash.

Doing this, you application (when started), will tell the OS to delete all of the AMS files (excluding your current, active one, of course) in the Temp Directory. I wouldn't suggest a total delete of the Temp Directory since other programs use this function to work properly and since it might add a LOT of time to this one line of code. This should clear the OS of any reference to files - corrupted or not, before continuing with the launch of your project. Since this all occures in one line (the "FileDeleteOnReboot" line) at startup of the application, it wouldn't matter if the application terminates suddenly at any point thereafter.

Provided that your hard drive isn't swiss cheese at that point.

[mindstitchdr]

I understand what you are saying but, I use the Publish-Hard drive folder (then build the installer using SF7) and my understanding is that nothing is decompressed to the temp folder. Maybe I'm wrong (which is possible) but, I can not locate anything referencing this app in the temp folders when the app is running or not.

[screwed over]

i think this only happens when your window mode is set to flat. also with the redraw action, you could use Application.Sleep(1000) to wait a second or 2 before redrawing the page. or you could do something like:

Window.Minimize(Application.GetWndHandle());
Application.Sleep(1000)
Window.Restore(Application.GetWndHandle())

[RizlaUK]

At first I thought you were talking about centered text within the dialogs and I would LOVE this.

Next version of PrettyDialogs will have alignable text, set background color, border type, also customizable folder and file browse dialogs, i needed some custom dialogs for a project so i tought id make them freeform, should be ready in a few days

EDIT, but will not be backwards compatable with last version....sorry

[mindstitchdr]

Well guys it looks like I have decided to stop working on the sidebar app because I found something that works awesome. ObjectDock Plus! Wow this app is cool. There is a free version that gives you one sidebar, or the Plus version ($19.95) that allows you to have as many docks as you want. Just to show you guys what it looks like, here are some images of my new desktop. Thanks for all the help with my sidebar.