This isn't really a bug or question even, but rather a discussion point that I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on.
I'm using FLTK to develop a trivial survey application for someone (for an HCI experiment for a University student) that grabs focus periodically. I'm using FLTK v1.1.10 to do this. The program is complete, but I had some problems getting the desired behaviour under Windows Vista and Windows 7. Whilst I suspect it depends on the window manager, under XFCE 4.8 on Arch Linux, the following code will grab focus even when the application in question is not currently active: window.show() i.e the process is bought to the foreground, which is what I want (damming the consequences if the person is typing at the time, please put aside your objection to that approach for the sake of this discussion). Obviously this is very simple and convenient for me, and I was able to program the application in a few hours. However, on Windows Vista and Windows 7, focus stealing is banned without permission from the current foreground process. As described in this rather militant post: See for example: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/02/20/9435239.aspx Disregarding whether or not focus stealing is a "sin", as I've no doubt some religious types believe it is, I am wondering whether FLTK is behaving correctly in its response to window.show() under Windows Vista and Windows 7. Under these OSs, calling window.show() does not grab focus (although I have read reports that suggest that some installations of Vista and 7 inconsistently allow it). Obviously this behaviour wasn't suitable for my application so I had to look to the windows API to work out how to solve it. I ended up doing this: HWND win = fl_xid(window); SetForegroundWindow(win); And the effect of doing so is that when this code is executed, although the process still doesn't grab focus and come to the foreground, the taskbar entry flashes a wonderfully irritating orange, so it at least gets the users attention, which is what I want. I know that perhaps using a tray icon with notifications might be a better way to get attention, but I think the flashing orange will suffice. My discussion point is: should FLTK by default include this code for window.show() when it is compiled under Windows Vista and Windows 7? I mean, what do users expect from window.show(), should it do the orange flashing by default? Or is the demand for background processes that pop into the foreground so little that the question isn't worth pondering? A second point is that more generally we might ask, should FLTK offer more control of focus events such as this, i.e z-index among unrelated processes, than it currently does? Regards Ashley Mills _______________________________________________ fltk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.easysw.com/mailman/listinfo/fltk
