+- Osiris Development Forums (http://osirisdevelopment.com/forum)
+-- Forum: BatteryBar (/forum-1.html)
+--- Forum: General Discussion (/forum-2.html)
+--- Thread: BatteryBar & Language Bar (/thread-166.html)
BatteryBar & Language Bar - ExodusC - 08-05-2010 05:06 AM
I have to say at first when I thought of a program like BatteryBar, I sort of rolled my eyes, assuming it would not be worth installing.
I'm sure glad I did, as BatteryBar is wonderful! It's simple and clean, but still functional. It works exactly like it should. I'm very impressed.
I did some searching about my problem, and I turned up a months old thread about the issue.
I suppose it's not a common problem, as the vast majority of Windows users do not even use the language bar, but for those of us who study another language or are bilingual, quickly switching between input languages is incredibly useful.
Anyhow, here's an overview of the problem. When using the language bar, for some reason either BatteryBar moves itself to the far left of the Windows toolbars, or (more likely) the language bar moves itself to the right. I'm unfamiliar with the Windows toolbar API, so I can't say for sure.
The problem is that when switching languages (let's say Japanese in my instance), the language bar can grow in size, which pushes BatteryBar to the left, where it gets stuck even if the language bar shrinks. Not only is it unsightly, it reduces the available space programs have on the Windows task bar.
In the last thread, Chris was unable to find any way to resolve this problem, and I assume it's the language bar that is buggy (or maybe just the Windows task bar?), and not BatteryBar.
I'm guessing no solution has been found, but I wanted to attempt to touch base here and see if there's anything that can be done.
Thanks to everyone in advance.
RE: BatteryBar & Language Bar - Chris - 08-05-2010 04:26 PM
It's not the language bar that's the problem, it's the way the toolbar APIs are implemented. As a toolbar, my application has no control over it's placement on the taskbar. The only thing I can do is report my preferred and minimum size to explorer.exe. The only thing I can do, that I know of, is to turn on the gripper that allows the user to manually change the toolbar's position. I have it off now to limit the space needed for the toolbar.
Now there may be other ways of implementing BatteryBar without using the IDeskBand interface in Windows, I believe some other programs do something different, but I don't know how they do it or what APIs they use. If I knew of another way of doing it, I certainly would.