Fitaly put where you want it... nearly there, discuss?

An issue with onscreen keyboard software is that you don't want it on screen when you're not keying ;-)

I've found a potential new solution to this. It is a donationware script in my "favourite" scripting language, AutoHotkey, and it does a lot more than many of my efforts - although mine (written and unwritten!) have some extra tricks! So for one thing, I'm interested in approaching this author and offering my technological distinctiveness to be added to his own ;-)

Essentially WinWarden - link follows - is a script program that takes instructions from an Ini file to monitor the state of a program window and, according to various events, change the window state, including to conform to another window.

In other words, you can say, "When this happens, I want Fitaly to go there or do that."

I have been using a script of my own (below) to hold Fitaly medium on top of screen coordinates 665, 618, which is inside my taskbar - it replaces my TIP button (and my taskbar is about 4cm tall... and the screen edge on this PC loses sensitivity). I do this because it keeps Fitaly from covering applications. And I need a script for this because applications in the taskbar area are quickly covered over (even with regular "on top") and pushed into the desktop/application field. What my script doesn't do that I'd like is run when the PC is momentarily idle, but that's achievable - instead, it runs every 2 seconds.

WinWarden can do this, but it doesn't have an idle mode. However, in AutoHotkey it should be easy to add.

(I also have used Windows PowerPro to replace the Start button and dead space below it with a narrow vertical button strip and digital clock.)

Another way to use Fitaly is to have it pop up near the text cursor. I wrote a prototype script for it. The function actually isn't in WinWarden either, but again I expect it can be added easily. Trickier is to have it pop up when the Tablet pen is brought into range of the digitizer; I don't think AutoHotkey recognises that. On the other hand, the difference between that and recognisable cursor events is subtle - by which I mean to suggest, unimportant.

I haven't got a handle on the Tablet Input Panel using AutoHotkey, but there are feasible ways around that (untested). One is to scan the screen for the appearance of the floating TIP icon. What I suggest is that /instead/ of launching TIP, Fitaly is launched to the icon's location.

WinWarden also offers to add semi-transparent and "ghost" mode to programs - clicks pass through to the next program underneath. This probably can be used to create a large Fitaly that only becomes fully visible and active when you want it to, and the rest of the time you ignore it - for instance you could overlay it on the taskbar application tabs; obviously you could tap its own tab to "switch on".

Now if Fitaly's developers are reading this and are interested in adding this sort of behaviour into Fitaly itself, the question is academic, but that may not happen soon - isn't PocketPC still the focus of development? But on the other hand, it may be worthwhile for users here who want to modify Fitaly's behaviour now to decide exactly what we may collectively want, and then make the script people an offer by PayPal. I actually don't have a PayPal account - I don't trust the company and I already get an alarming volume of fake PayPal spam - and I'm looking for someone to do transactions for me, but I think that the tool with run-when-idle added in would be worth maybe $8 of my money. Less if I make the changes myself...

And there are other onscreen keyboard users, they probably have similar issues... maybe the club can be bigger?

There may be a performance issue, particularly on slower Tablets... that's what's looking me in the face just now! (Compaq TC1000)
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Documentation for WinWarden consists of it generating a file WinWarden.ini when run, containing comment lines. To speed things up a bit, here is a line that when Fitaly is activated, moves it to bottom right inside a Notepad window:

Active ,Fitaly,,- Notepad,,-Right,-Bottom,,,On,,,,,,,,,,,

This might be more useful if it runs when -Notepad- is activated; I'd put that on the suggestion list as well. In fact I'll write to the bloke once I've posted this.

My own script to keep Fitaly on the taskbar is brutally simple. My script to move Fitaly to the cursor's location is both brutally simple and missing, but I hope I have a copy at home! Here's the taskbar one:

#SingleInstance, Force

WinGet, WinTarget1, PID, ahk_class FitalyMainWindow
Loop
{
; If (Not WinExist("ahk_pid " WinTarget1) )
; Break
WinSet, Top,, ahk_pid %WinTarget1%
WinMove, ahk_pid %WinTarget1%, , 655, 618
Sleep, 2000
}

WinWarden can do this and is considerably more sophisticated, so I'm taking it as a message to give up ;-) (Since writing a better script for this has been on my mental "to do" list for a very long time without any action occurring, I suppose "give up" now is an undeserved compliment to myself!)