Some placement issues with top taskbars

Hi! I found this project because someone I follow starred this.

I’ve been working on a similar project, yet found this. I think this could potentially be a better project than mine, so I decided to write up a couple of issues I’ve noticed with top taskbars to potentially help you a bit along the way.

1. Window thumbnails are rendered offscreen.
2. Taskview is rendered at the bottom of the display
3. Notifications and control panel are oriented from bottom-to-top when the taskbar is at the top

Some of these issues I’ve fixed in my own project. Following is some info that may help people potentially fixing it.

Window Thumbnail misplacement

When hovering a taskbar icon, the thumbnail is rendered above the taskbar. To fix this, I had my program poll every x milliseconds for the thumbnails window, and place it under the taskbar with the win32 call SetWindowPos. The thumbnails window’s class name is TaskListThumbnailWnd. It’s window title varies, but finding the window by class should work fine.

Taskview misplacement

The taskview has a similar issue to the thumbnail view, yet instead of getting rendered above the taskbar it gets rendered at the bottom of the screen (+ the taskbar height). Fixing this was done with a SetWindowPos call as well. It’s window class is XamlExplorerHostIslandWindow. It’s window title is empty.

Notifications and controlpanel view misplacement

I haven’t found a fix for this yet. The notification view window has the same height as the display, even when the actual contents don’t add up to that height. I haven’t been able to calculate the actual height due to the actual window appearing to be XAML based. The window classes for both is Windows.UI.Core.CoreWindow, with their window titles being Control Center and Notification Center respectively.

One small issue here is that these solutions require polling User32 APIs to find windows and their positions (and fix them).

In conclusion

I really want this to work, as I am extremely petty towards Microsoft’s decision to lock the taskbar. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss possible solutions 😃 (Discord Naamloos#2887)

By the way, my existing solution can be found here: https://github.com/Naamloos/TopCenterStart11/blob/master/src/main.rs (it’s a single source file, but it works.)

[jetspiking]

For a next release I hope to give the entire app support to keep it running in the background (and hide the taskbar icon). In the registry a path can be set to launch an application. A service could be prevented this way to keep this application as portable as possible. This was suggested in the following issue by @Euclidite.

https://github.com/jetspiking/Taskbar11/issues/14

[jetspiking]

Hi there!

Thank you for your extensive reply. This sounds like a great solution for the thumbnail issue and the placement of the startmenu.

What is the issue with the Task View and notifications? I am not noticing any elements falling off sceen.

I will attempt to implement a fix for the thumbnail misplacement in the upcoming version, this is probably the most important issue with a top-aligned taskbar.