[Windows Mobile Development and Hacking General] vijay555:
SiliconS: yes, recreating the whole desktop shell. Resizeable windows, draggable windows, all skinnable if desired. I was using a pseudo glass effect yesterday, but again, switched it off for now because art is not my forte! (The screenshot shows the "caption" bar as 12 pixels high, hence the small task icons are truncated from 16x16. I'll enlarge the caption bar later, but I'm not a fan of big caption bars - BeOS semi transparent caption tabs are also feasible and skinnable).

I'm using a Vista type theme, with round edged windows (XP barely manages that!). I did put in shadows but I've disabled them for now because you couldn't see the round edges, and I'm quite pleased with them :)

The underlying windowing system is standard Win32 with some arm twisting. However, it does rely on some low level coding in various places, but suprisingly little. Hence, it's compatible with all WinCE AFAIK.

The windowing system uses very little extra overhead, and since on original WinCE the apps are generally active in the background anyway, it adds no more overhead to running the programs then they normally use, so all in, not much increased processor usage. The thing that generates the most overhead right now is the background wallpaper! But that's a bigass 800x600 being dynamically resized to fit the Universal.

I like a very non obtrusive interface on my system; I use a custom web browser I've been writing in VB for some years for the PC, so this app was based on a similar idea to get rid of some of the WinCE OS baggage and restrictions, like fullscreen dialogs etc. In the process, multiple IE windows, multiple everything pretty much. I'm going to try to spin off Multiple PIE windows for you guys into an app called VJMultiPlIE.

I've worked on a start bar replacement, and as you can see, the Today screen is already a "window" (tiny blue one), but I've made draggable Today plugins, so you can eliminate the Today screen altogether and have custom layouts (like Wisbar Desktop). SIPs are also draggable, and you can run multiple instances, eg keep the keyboard and transcriber running at the same time, depending on your fancy. I'll try to implement docking at some point, that's always cute.

Having the freedom to write your own interface suddenly makes you realise how many things you'd change... this can hopefully be implemented as a Today screen replacement, so you wouldn't need the overhead of both. The Today screen gets surpingly resource hungry, and you don't always need every plugin running all the time, so imagine instead running a few defaults, and then a few others in a huge screen on its own etc, just as and when required. So no overhead except when they're loaded, but full functionality.

Phew, time for lunch.

V

PS the hardest thing was trying to record a video of this early this morning, 5am. I used the MS powertoys but too slow (I have some ideas about how to improve that, but that's for another day!) I'm going to try and write a cursor emulator and try again so you can see where I'm clicking, to see full windowing in action. I think ISilo looks so cute in a tiny window, and the calendar dynamically resizes to however much space you give it.