Expose with Applescript?

g-dog

Wouldn't it be possible to write in applescript combined with something like Realbasic to make a mock-expose program?



All a person would need to do is get the size and postion of every window being displayed by every app.



Scale them down and tile them on the screen such as eexpose does? then do some graphics overlays.



Does this sound possible or am I just dreaming?



I'm looking at this and sayng, "Why wait for panther for this ability?"



So the real question is "Why not now?"



I'm going to look into doing this if anybody wants to help by all means post away.

smircle

Quote:

Originally posted by G-Dog

Wouldn't it be possible to write in applescript combined with something like Realbasic to make a mock-expose program?



All a person would need to do is get the size and postion of every window being displayed by every app.

There is a slight problem with that: with either Quartz or Quartz Extreme, you cannot just get the base pointer of the screen memory and copy the bits that make up the window content from there.

With Quartz, you have the problem of overlapping windows, with Quartz Extreme, you need to copy back from the gfx-card which might take some coding.



So for Quartz, you'd need to somehow access the windowlists for each program (or a global window list and copy out the pixels from there.

For Quartz Extreme, you might need to hook into the compositor (maybe you could do that for Quartz too) and catch the window content when it is updated.



It is doable, but a lot of work considering that Panther is half a year away, at most.

socrates

I don't think RB is up to the task speed-wise. RB uses quicktime for image scaling, not quartz, and it's much slower (no hardware support). I would guess it would take a second or more to scale ten windows or so.