AutoHotkey Community

[FireGirl]

I am getting into developing GUI applications.... one technique I would absolutely love to achieve is the following: (I will do my best to eloborate with my words ....


Basically, if I 'pick up' a GUI and throw it around the screen in a wild jerky motion, so to speak, and let off the mouse button, I want the GUI to continue sliding in the general direction I inferred, but just for a moment as it should slow down and stop (not go totally crazy.... but not the usual pinpoint precision drop/and go typical with Windows GUI). Sort of a GUI that can react to slide GUI's around with less hand effort.... though I know it will not be as precise, it can work in certain situations to move a GUI window in a general direction..... can someone help me with pointers or a way to achieve this, that isn't too messy or too clunky?

I know AHK is great to design GUI's.... is there a way to give GUI's more screen elasticity and 'floating' sort of properties? I know this may be annoying to some users, but I have a special partially disabled user requesting this feature in a application which relies heavily on moving gui controls, who doesn't have precision hand-eye movement control.... so something like this would be perfect to give more flexibility and general capability to move windows using allot less effort/movements of the hand than a controlled pick up, move hand, drop gui, etc....

Best wishes, & thank you for any guidance.

Sincerely, Fire

[Titan]

[FireGirl]

Wow thank you Titan!! You are the best. It is amazing you can think so easily like that. I must admit, this is turning out to be a bit over my head on technical implementation (bezier curves and whatnot) ... but Your tech psychics analysis thinking sounds achievable. If you can, or someone else catching this can decipher Titan's data and turn out a example that would be very very helpful to me.

Brilliant Titan! Thank you for advancing this one step. I feel like I am one step closer to making this dream become reality for a user Have a very nice day.

[ManaUser]

Here's my stab at it. It

[FireGirl]

That is so wonderful ManaUser ...., I am surprised you did that in relativity few lines of code. IF anyone at the sound of these words knows bezier curves or whatnot, and can implement it and a boundary so the GUI will not leave the screen --- this will be so perfect.

Thanks a million. Sincerest wishes, Firegirl

[ManaUser]

I can do the edges part at least. Do you really want it to bounce?

[FireGirl]

I was envisioning it to bounce proportional to the force applied against it., but by default not to the extent that if a GUI was slung with amazing force, it shouldn't bounce like a ping-pong ball all over the place out of control.... that would be a problem. The best analogy I can use is, maybe envision it like bouncing up against a wall of mattresses, like a brake and it will bounce & decelerate down against a variable 1-100 that can be set So 100 would be like a ping pong ball maybe, 10 would barely bump away, and 1 would stick like a magnet, and I suppose 0 will turn off bouncing and the GUI can simply float off screen.... that may be most logical & helpful to have this adjustability in certain situations.....I am also real curious how to get the smooth factor down so it is pleasant to look at. Maybe someone else understands what Titan was suggesting with bezier curves or his other concepts to get the fluid motion in place, and we can cross-implement this.

I am so amazed how we can work together using the Internet. Thank you so much for helping and getting the ball rolling, and helping me put this together for a student. You are a great person and it is looking great.

If anyone else out there wants to help with the smooth part please jump in the mix!! We will thank you over-and-over immensely!

Have an awesome day!!!
Sincerely, Firegirl

[PhiLho]

I was able to improve ManaUser's excellent starting point.
Now, the window stops if it hits the walls, er, the screen bounds, and if the speed becomes too low.
It is stopped completely, so you have to rebind again the window to move it again, it might be annoying or a good thing.
I added some informative tooltips to show what is going on.

[ManaUser]

I've been playing around with this some more, and noticed something awkward with the edge handling. Normally you can drag a window (partway) off the screen, but we don't want it to "glide" off the screen. The interaction between these two things is... odd.

So I was thinking, what if instead off dragging the title bar as normal, you could drag the window by pointing at any part and holding down the middle mouse button? This way the script would have full control over the dragging and could prevent it from going off the edge at any time. (I got this idea from the EasyWindowDrag sample script.)

[ManaUser]

Okay, give this a try. I really like how it came out. No more pressing F9, this version works on any window, and you don't even have to drag by the title bar. Just use the middle button. You can also fiddle with SPEEDMULT, INERTIA and BOUNCYNESS variables to tweak the effect.

[FireGirl]

Brilliant! Wow this is so cool & great.....

Sincerely, Firegirl.

[SKAN]

@Paul: Nice demo

[Laszlo]

Nice script, Paul! I fixed a couple of bugs and sped it up a little by moving those instructions out of the timer routines, which always give the same results. There are a few other changes:

1. Moving from the current window position is not only slow (needs to ask for the current coordinates), but also makes the end of glide often vertical or horizontal, when one of the speed components becomes less than 0.5 (it does not contribute to the move any more). Fractional position values are better, they keep on growing, and when they reach the next pixel value, the window moves in that direction, too. This way the glide remains in the correct direction.

2. We don't need the variables LastWinX/Y, the dragging speed can be determined from the mouse coordinates.

3. Sometimes, when you release the middle mouse button, the window dragging stops, or changes direction, preventing glide, or directing it in the wrong direction. I added geometric averaging of the last speed values to reduce the effects of this occasional glitches.

[ManaUser]

Huh, I just realized I'd been using an outdated version. I had to upgrade to get "foo ? bar : baz" to work. Anyway...

[FireGirl]

Synergy city! I can't believe how good this headed so amazingly quick and efficiently

Thank you all so so much....

Peace & Grace, Firegirl