Tuesday, January 16, 2007

App #3 on the runway

OK, we have a winner in the app implementation lottery: Cabin Tom's suggestion for a "file placement" utility. The idea here is simple: when downloading things to the Desktop, Tom is bothered by the fact that the icons for these downloaded files get scattered all through his carefully set up working icons. He'd prefer that the files get tossed into a separate part of the Desktop.

Since the Desktop is of course just a directory which gets special treatment, my solution is a two-parter:
  1. Reimplement miechu's directory monitor in a more generalized way, so that a generically specified action is taken whenever the contents of a directory change
  2. Implement an action for that utility to take which consists of modifying the icon properties of the file in the directory, so that they get moved into a specified area of the screen.
This is going to be a bit of a challenge for me, because I'm not at all familiar with the Windows classes to get this kind of task done. But in principle it ought to be easy. Right? Yeah!

3 Comments:

At 5:56 AM, Blogger James said...

Oh, oh - what a good idea.

A AppAWeek project I can relate to, want and will use. Hope it works out!

 
At 3:42 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

sweet, id use this to, might even be a good idea for a firefox addon

-Dargon
-kshahan (at) stalkzone.com

 
At 12:26 AM, Blogger Michael said...

I've taken a very brief look at Firefox extensions and come away a shaken man. That stuff is not for the weak at heart, and let me tell you, I'm weak at heart. At least regarding Firefox extensions.

I would need a week or two just to get things boiled down to the Firefox extension "Hello, world." Don't get me wrong -- it'd be a fine endeavor and a great tech article, but after my long coding hiatus, I'm going to have to pump a little more iron before I can tackle Firefox.

 

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