I'm new to Windows development, and am looking for assistance on where to get started for a particular project.
In short, I want to create a windowed application that allows a user to send keyboard and mouse inputs to another application, by interacting with various UI controls via touch. Essentially a custom on-screen keyboard/touchpad that can be used for sending keyboard-shortcuts to other applications.
There are two applications in Windows 10 that perform exactly the way I would want my new app to - the On-Screen Keyboard and Touchpad:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4337906/windows-10-open-the-on-screen-touchpad
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10762/windows-use-on-screen-keyboard
At the most basic level, I want to define my own interface (or allow the end user to define their own), and use the same code that the onscreen keyboard/touchpad are using for handling touch events and injecting inputs into the system.
I'm uncertain at what level I would need to start to get the functionality I need - UWP? WPF? C++?
If anyone has any insight into how the on-screen utilities were built, I think that would give me an excellent head start.
I have two applications: a business application using Angular and a chat application built with NodeJs.
In an Angular controller, I have written code to open the chat application login screen using...
$window.open("http:IPaddress/port/", "_blank","location=0,resizable=yes,top=100,left=20,width=650,height=400")
It is opening the new tab but with with an address bar on it. I want to get rid of the address bar. In IE, by default, the address bar is hidden but on Chrome it is visible.
Could anyone suggest a way to open this new tab as popup without $window.Open() and hide address bar?
can't be turned off, security requirement so users know which site they are actually on.
the only exception might be IE11 running on Win7
The Chromium team has indicated that ignoring the value of location is intended behavior.
You'll need to work around it. One option would be to put the chat view inside the window/tab that's displaying the business application using a chat library like converse.
We have a asp.net web application which will be used in an intranet environment on IE 6. We want to change the default configuration of the browser so that it's always rendered without the Tool Bars, Menu Bars and Address Bar, just the browser window frame and the status bar should be present.
We were looking at the IEAK toolkit for IE6 but it doesn't seem to have the option of turning all this off though you can turn off certain menus and toolbar options.
Any ideas of how this can be done, is there a group policy setting or something that we can utilize here to get this done?
Thanks for your help.
You have to handle the showing of toolbars, address bar,... before the page is loaded, because it's built client side.
So to solve your problem, I think you should write the first page (Enter page for example) Then when use click on the Enter link you open another page using VBScript or Javascript to remove toolbars, address bar,...
Hope this helps ^^
Have you investigated Kiosk Mode?
Also, you're deploying IE6 at the wrong end of its lifecycle.
It also sounds like your requirement is for an app you're developing; mandating that the browser is configured this way for all sites might make the customers unhappy. If you want to know how to open a browser window without those things for your site, from your site, I'd suggest a repost to StackOverflow.
We are programming a web application (not 'just' a web site, but functionality-wise a real application), and have the following discussion for the next release:
our UI designer wants to replace the browser's right-click context menu (showing our own menu where appropriate, or no menu at all) because he wants the web app to be more like our (existing) Windows app
our developers (and I) strongly object because this is bad practice, and simply something you do not do in a web application
Thus, I'm looking for "more solid" arguments - like best practice guidelines, any statements from reputable sources, coding arguments etc. - for the pros and cons of this issue, which I can hopefully use to resolve it once and for all...
You can't do that reliably anyway. In Firefox, go to Settings, Contents, JavaScript/Advanced (I'm guessing the captions, no English Firefox (; ) to override context menu behaviour and bang, your app doesn't work anymore. My online-banking application did this in their old version, so I couldn't do copy & paste with the mouse. I hated it, so I enabled the protection in Firefox and it worked. Kind of. Their new version doesn't do such bad things anymore.
Instead, use a little drop-down arrow where a context menu is needed, that can either be clicked or just hovered over to show the menu. JetBrains' TeamCity web app does that very well.
If your application is to run in an intranet, maybe the UI designer arguments are valid: as long as all of the users of the application are well known and you want to emulate some Windows application, I think it's ok to restrict the right-click or any other input, because it's just the requirements of this application, as it would be to any other app.
But if your application is to run in the internet, disabling or replacing right-click is a very bad idea, and these are only some of the arguments I reminded of:
First of all, changing the behavior of the user interface is aggressive and annoying -- no one wants to get used to "new controls" just to access your site, and generally people hate to leave their comfort area. I mean, I know what my right click does and I want it to do always the same thing.
People can understand the difference between Windows apps and web apps, so there's no need to "emulate Windows app behavior".
Not everyone uses Windows :-)
Also, this is innefective, sice there are several ways to overwrite this behavior, such as settings in Firefox or even plugins that disable specific javascript instructions, such as this one.
depending on your audience you stand a very good chance your users do not even KNOW there's a right click menu. So please don't make this the only alternative
I personally believe you should leave browser's default behaviors alone... users are used to them, so no need to get them used to your way of doing things.
However, if you're building an intranet (instead of a public site), then I'm for tweaking as much as possible to improve usability.
An argument I would use (in quotes for dramatic effect):
Lack of consistency & reduced
functionality compared to other
unhindered web interfaces will lead to
a loss of user confidence - which
is undesirable to say the least.
Of course, if many or most of the web application users are already familiar with or regular users of the Windows app, the UI designer could be on the right track and the consistency with the Windows app could be a winner.
That said, in my opinion it's hard to make a custom context-menu within a web page intuitive, and while some users might warm to it, I'm guessing most will probably never use it.
because he wants the web app to be more like our (existing) Windows app
I think right-click in a Windows app is a bad idea.
In a web browser it's a UI disaster because nobody will be expecting it.
I think it depends on whether you perceive the context-menu as part of the browsers chrome or not. If you do (and I ascribe to this view), then it should be off target, but otherwise it is a good place for adding some usability to your application.
Replacing the browser right-click context menu for specific areas of your GUI from your web application can be quite useful. Doing this just to disable the context menu will annoy your users, who may try to find a way around it. Also, removing or replacing the browser right-click context menu from the entire area of your application will usually be annoying and can make it more difficult to debug.
Unfortunately, I cannot offer any more solid arguments, and I'm not exactly taking either side of the argument, but I thought I would share my experience both as a developer of a web application and as a web user.
In my a web application, I have a part to invoke an activex control .The Activex control is available in all the client PCs who are accessing my web application from web server. But When trying to run this ActiveX control from the browser in client machine (using Wshell), It was not getting invoked since "Run Activex Controls and Pluggins" are disabled in my browser. So I changed the browser settings to enable mode and Then the Activex control gave me the expected output. I afraid that this change in browser settings would allow any other website to harm my system. How could I get rid of this problem? Any thoughts? Thanks in advance
There had been a lotta secutiry changes introduced from Vista + IE7 onwards. Where in the IE starts in the procted mode, which helps protect users from attack by running the Internet Explorer process with greatly restricted privileges. Protected Mode significantly reduces the ability of an attack to write, alter or destroy data on the user's machine or to install malicious code.
More details : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250462.aspx#wpm_aarwm
So developers have to modify the applications to confirm to the new standards like starting the process from the plugin - sending widows messages from LI(Low Intergirty) to HI process etc.
You can digitally sign your ActiveX so that users do not have to compromise the security of their browser too much in order to allow it to run. But, essentially, ActiveX isn't very secure and these problems always pop up when you choose ActiveX...