AutoHotkey Community

Murp|e · Joined: 12 Jan 2007 Posts: 261 Location: Norway

This may or may not be a wish depending on whether or not any good solutions are suggested, but I thought this might be the most befitting forum. I have a few scripts which cycle through all files in a given folder and process them one by one. One script converts all .DWG drawings to .PDF drawings by using DWG TrueView and a PDF printer. The nice thing with this setup is that it's free, and it's proven to be fairly reliable. The other nice thing, is that if it stops, I can manually do whatever step that failed and the script will continue from there. (Many winwaitactive commands). A nice feature for this sort of script, would be to have a sort of status bar, or anything that informs the user what's going on. I think many scripts could benefit from this sort of thing.

The best solution I can think of is to create a function which displays a toolbar tip somewhere on the screen. Something like status("Waiting for a active window: Adobe PDF"). The tooltip would remain in the same position for example in the bottom right of the screen.

Any thoughts?

tic · Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 1375

A simple

dmatch · Joined: 15 Oct 2007 Posts: 113

If you are using (or could use a Gui window) there is a StatusBar Gui control that is described in the help file under "StatusBar controls (GUI)". If not, the Progress Bar idea as suggested by tic seems a good alternative.

dmatch

dmatch · Joined: 15 Oct 2007 Posts: 113

I haven't done much with StatusBar so thought I would see what it had to offer. I did this little prototype to experiment with:

Murp|e · Joined: 12 Jan 2007 Posts: 261 Location: Norway

Firstly, thanks for the replies. The progressbar and statusbar of a GUI window was not what I was thinking of, although I understand they were recommended.

My point was having a good and preferably standard way of displaying the status (not progress) of a script. In the example above, my script often waits for the active window to contain some text and I think it should be easy to display what the script is doing somewhere on the screen in a non obtrusive way. I may be wrong, but wouldn't using a GUI window complicate this by interfering with the active window or can it be made to always be on top but never active? If so, then I suppose a GUI window consisting of a progress bar and a status bar would be a good solution.

I was thinking along the lines of using a tooltip, traytip or invisible GUI with text. I suppose it's possible to create a good solution and this should probably have been posted in the Ask for help section. Right now, I'm thinking the traytip might be nice.

engunneer · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 6:08 pm Post subject:

be careful, since I found that the traytip tends to steal focus (haven't tried in a while)

Tooltips seem the least intrusive, or the progress or splashimage commands, which are a little more obtrusive, but very controllable.

There is also a script for toaster style popups made in ahk.
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Murp|e · Joined: 12 Jan 2007 Posts: 261 Location: Norway

I found the post for the toaster style popup. Although I couldn't get it to work, it seems a little too advanced for my needs. I think I will stick with the standard tooltip then. Thanks a lot!

engunneer · Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 4:21 pm Post subject:

did you try either of my posts in that thread? they are both working. The OP did have a bug
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Unless otherwise noted, all code is untested.
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Murp|e · Joined: 12 Jan 2007 Posts: 261 Location: Norway

I did now and it didn't work, I reinstalled AHK on my machine and now the toaster message popsup and popsaway. It looks very nice and I will surely find some use for this in the future, thanks again.