MS Windows taskbar integration

[Antoine Martin]

Windows 7 onwards support customization of the taskbar entry for our application, we could do something with it:

• simply add the most common tray menu options there (since the tray is now also hidden by default..)
• use it for forwarding application menus if it has some (see #228 for Ubuntu's global menu)

Pointers:

• ​ICustomDestinationList AddUserTasks Specifies items to include in the Tasks category of a custom Jump List.
• ​Taskbar Extensions : Tasks Another built-in portion of a Jump List is the Tasks category..

See also #472

[Antoine Martin]

Scheduling for this release, together with #472 and #476.

[Antoine Martin]

Too late, re-scheduling.

[Antoine Martin]

Best example code found so far:

• ​Using Windows 7 taskbar features in PyQt
• ​wxPython and windows 7 taskbar (implementation for the link above)
• ​taskbar support for scummvm (win32 and unity) (only used for showing progress bar and recent items?)

[Antoine Martin]

copy of the idl file

[Antoine Martin]

The examples in comment:4 work but this is not the interface we need. We could still use them to enhance the tray/menu classes with progress bar support, etc.

• make the tlb:

  midl TaskbarLib.idl /tlb TaskbarLib.tlb
  

• use it with GTK: (requires ​comtypes)

  import gtk
  window = gtk.Window()
  window.show()
  
  import comtypes.client as cc
  cc.GetModule("TaskbarLib.tlb")
  import comtypes.gen.TaskbarLib as tbl
  taskbar = cc.CreateObject("{56FDF344-FD6D-11d0-958A-006097C9A090}", interface=tbl.ITaskbarList3)
  taskbar.HrInit()
  taskbar.SetProgressValue(window.get_window().handle,40,100)
  

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For the menus, what we want is ​Tasks and more specifically: ​AddUserTasks.
There is some support for it in pywin32 already:

> from win32com.shell import shell
> shell.CLSID_DestinationList
IID('{77F10CF0-3DB5-4966-B520-B7C54FD35ED6}')

[Antoine Martin]

By the looks of things, "tasks" is not it: present even when the application is not running. Maybe ​Jump Lists?
But even that is not a good fit...

The only workable solutions that I can think of are:

• ​Custom Window Frame Using DWM. (see ​Setting up a custom title bar on Vista/Windows 7 and ​Setting up a custom title bar – reprise)
• reserve some space at the top of the window for a regular gtk menu

Both of which would have all sorts of interesting interactions with window hints, size constraints, events, position...

---

Unrelated:

• along the way, found this useful com example: ​Accessing unregistered COM objects from python via a registered TLB.
• I can create "shell items" with:

  import pythoncom
  pythoncom.CoCreateInstance(shell.CLSID_ShellItem, None, pythoncom.CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, shell.IID_IShellItem)
  

[Antoine Martin]

Milestone renamed