Titlebar Bug Workaround Challenge

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, J. Landman Gay wrote:

> With the caveat that I haven't actually tried any of this, I was
> thinking along these lines:
> 
> Your real stack is modeless, the proxy is toplevel. The proxy is
> offscreen, the modeless one looks like the real thing. The user clicks
> the (fake) minimize button in your fake titlebar. The button script
> hides the stack it's in, and sends an iconify message to the proxy. The
> proxy gets iconified and is represented in the taskbar.
> 
> When the user clicks the taskbar, an uniconify message gets sent to the
> proxy. The proxy stack script catches this message and makes the real
> stack visible again.
> 
> Would that do it?

Yes this works fine.

But the (minor) problem arises when the user *doesn't* use the stack's
minimize button and instead clicks the stack's icon button in the taskbar.
The first click makes the proxy stack active; then the second click actually
does the minimizing.  So it's not that this arrangement doesn't work at all
-- it's just that the first taskbar click doesn't do anything (as far as the
user knows) so the minimize behavior appears to be buggy.

And check this out: since Vista displays thumbnail representations of open
applications above the taskbar, I have to create a snapshot in my proxy
stack of the real stack's current screen every time it changes, so that the
taskbar thumbnail is accurate.  I hate jumping through these hoops.

Thanks for your continued suggestions.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design