Swing Hacks

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Chapter 6, Transparent and Animated Windows

#46 Slide Notes Out from the Taskbar

HACK

H A C K

#46

Slide Notes Out from the Taskbar Hack #46

Pop up a note above the taskbar when your application wants attention.

On Windows, long-running applications sometimes will slide in a window

above the taskbar to call attention to themselves when an interesting event

occurs, such as a finished download or an IM buddy’s appearance.

If you want to do this in Java, you need to deal with a pretty significant

problem: neither AWT nor Swing has any concept of the taskbar (where it

is, how big it is, whether it’s auto-hiding, or anything else). As a result, you

don’t know where to draw the window, and just taking a guess or hardcod-

ing something is hazardous—too high and the window floats inexplicably

on the desktop, too low and it gets buried under the taskbar.

Furthermore, how is this going to work on other operating systems? On the

Mac, the proper way to get attention is to bounce your application’s dock

icon. Since there’s no API exposing that functionality, can you at least use a

Windows-like slide-in window above the dock? Sure…if you can figure out

how tall the dock is (it’s user configurable), or whether the dock is even on

the bottom of the screen (it might be on the right or left, too).

Fortunately, it is possible to figure out what unobstructed space is available

to you on the main display. After that, ...