Some software utilities

I've started producing a few possibly useful little utility programs, and thought I might as well make them freely available to anyone who wants them - only little bits of software, mind: I want to get paid for anything big!

Before I start, here's the standard disclaimer: as is the case with most of the software in the world, the author takes no responsibility whatsoever for any problems caused directly or indirectly by this program - if it breaks something, that's your problem! By all means tell me, but don't expect me to actually do anything about it.

Fire Starter (latest version 1.2.0.0)

Some Win32 (Windows 95/98/ME or NT4/2000) programs I've used seem to occupy far more of the task bar than they really warrant - the worst offender was Hummingbird's eXceed X server. While it was a great bit of software, it (at least the version I used) placed one icon there for each open window and one extra one, that I virtually never touched, for the server itself. I wrote this little utility to help give me back some of the task bar: you give it a command line and it "hides" all the icons associated with that program in one small entry in the system tray. A click on this icon brings back all those task bar icons, and another click hides them again.

If you want to use it, download and unzip the binary (if you've got Windows 2000 or XP, this one is much more efficient) and replace the shortcut (or create one) for the command you want to execute with yourpath\FireStarter.exe "yourcommand" "yourargs" (the quotation marks are really only necessary if there are spaces in the command). For example, in my eXceed case, I merely had "C:\Program Files\FireStarter.exe" "C:\Program Files\exceed\exceed.exe". When you fire up your program from this shortcut, you get an extra icon in the system tray, hopefully with a copy of the icon from the original program. Clicking on this toggles the main application windows and icons from "hidden" to visible. And that's all it does.

It does use some shell extension functions, so you may need at least IE4.01 installed (or then again you might not - I've yet to get to grips with what OS extensions snuck in on the back of which IE version...).

If you're interested in the source, help yourself. There are some comments in the code explaining how it works, but basically here's what happens: FireStarter spawns off the original command line as a sub-process, so that application behaves as normal. In addition, it monitors clicks of the system tray icon and toggles the display of all the top level windows belonging to the sub-process. There is one extra task in there, to check for the original application being closed, which FireStarter uses as its signal to exit too. The only tricky bit in there is determining which window(s) belong to the application: I just enumerate all the Windows and grab those that have the same process identifier and that have a valid title and size.

There are a few other tools kicking about that do a similar (or better) job, such as TrayIt which takes the process a bit further and adds some of the original application's menu commands to the tray icon. The Minimizer also looks pretty good.

Irman interface (latest version 1.0.2.0)

The Irman device is a relatively inexpensive way to get remote control of your PC: this is a code library what makes using it under Windows 95/98/NT fairly easy. The binary package is just this built into a small application (or a plugin) to drive Winamp 2 (will not work with Winamp 3) via your remote; the source package has the source for the interface class, as well as the application itself. The readme file in these ZIPs has much more detail, especially about the source code, but if you just want to run the application...

When you start WinampIR.exe, you'll get a tray icon (and possibly a warning that the COM port could not be opened first time you use it). Generally the first thing you need to do is configure it - clicking on the icon will pop up a menu and it should be obvious what you select... The configuration dialog box lets you specify which COM port to use, and then train the code to recognise your remote: just click each button and then press the remote key you want to correspond to it. If you get a failed report, just try again. You can use the test facility to check that everything went according to plan. Finally, when you close the configure menu again, keys will be forwarded to Winamp if it's running. (My program does not start up Winamp automatically, and in fact is not very integrated with it.)

If you want to use the plugin instead, just copy the DLL into your Winamp plugins directory, and it will be available when you next start Winamp. Select the plugin and hit Winamp's configure button to train, as above. The code works just the same, just more tightly knit into Winamp - and there is no tray icon this time.

This bit of software is the subject of an article in the May 2000 issue of Dr Dobb's Journal.

Winamp title bar control (latest version 4.1.11 for Win9x/NT and 5.1.4 for Win2K)

This was developed for Winamp 2, and definitely does not work with Winamp 3 - I have not tried it myself, but people have said it works to some degree with Winamp 5.

This utility has been superseded by the TitleBar Positioner below, and I've ceased development of WinampBar. If you have any problems using WinampBar, just uninstall (instructions in the readme - basically, ensure Winamp is not running and detete all gen_bktb files in the plugins directory) and forget about it - I'm not going to help you!

This adds Winamp controls and the song title and track time to the righthand end of the foreground application, as shown below. Note that it knows nothing about Windows XP themes - it'll make your title bars look horrible (another good reason to use TitleBar Positioner instead).

The binary package is supplied in Nullsoft PiMP format: just run it to install the plugin. The source package contains everything you need to build it - just add Visual C++ 6 and Nullsoft's MakePiMP.

The above version is not very Win2K friendly - it suffers from nasty latencies, so I've produced a version customised for Win2K: the binary and source are available as is a Unicode binary for improved efficiency. (The ANSI version will run on Win9x, but won't be as pretty as the older one mentioned above.)

Executing the PiMP file will place the gen_bktb.dll into the Winamp plugins directory, and next time you start Winamp, the foreground application should have the extra buttons and title on the righthand side of the title bar. You can configure the plugin to separately enable or disable each of the buttons and the title and time: have a look Winamp's Preferences dialog box.

This was originally the subject of an EXE article, but has changed an awful lot since then. The current code has received very little testing on Windows 95, 98 or NT, since I do not have ready access to systems running either of those OSes.

Winamp screen reader helper (latest version 1.0.2)

This is a derivative of the above created specially for the folk at ACB Radio Interactive who found that WinampBar gave them the ability to read elapsed time with their screen readers. (Again, it is WInamp 2 only.) WinampSP is a very straightforward plugin which makes available current track title and elapsed/remaining time in a standard Windows control, easy for screen readers to interpret. It also forwards all standard key presses to Winamp, making it relatively easy to control Winamp too.

The binary package is supplied in Nullsoft PiMP format: just run it to install the plugin. The source package contains everything you need to build it - just add Visual C++ 6 and Nullsoft's MakePiMP. As it is such a simple program, it might be of use in learning how to write general plugins.

(It may well be possible to do more than 90% of the work of this plugin with a suitable skin, but it was quicker for me to hack the existing plugin than to learn how to create skins.)

Executing the PiMP file will place the gen_bkrd.dll into the Winamp plugins directory, and next time you start Winamp, a new window appears containing the track information.

General purpose media player positioner (latest version 1.4.2)

This is a generalisation of WinampBar for use with just about any media player (or other application) instead of being tied to Winamp 2.x. TitleBar Positioner takes care of positioning a media player control window, as WinampBar does, but delegates all aspects of drawing and operating the controls to the media player itself: in other words, it moves the media player around. This is possible, and a reasonable thing to do, with the skinning ability of most media players these days.

I've moved on to Windows Installer format for the installer here which offers a lot of benefits, despite the cost in terms of file size. There are Unicode and ANSI binaries. The latter should run on most variants of 32-bit Windows but the former will be somewhat more efficient for Windows 2000/XP. (If you are installing on anything older than Windows XP, you will need to install Windows Installer 2.0 itself first - the ANSI version for Windows 9x, and the Unicode version for Windows NT and 2000.) The source is available - this time you'll need Visual Studio .NET (not because I'm using any .NET facilities here, but simply because the project files are in VS.NET format).

I'm afraid that's all for the moment - more coming soon... maybe...

Feedback

I used to have a feedback form here, but I'm getting so much spam that I really can't be bothered any more. Apologies to anyone who did want to talk to me.

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Last modified on 10th February 2007