whoa! that's really awesome!! maybe this is a trick?

a program like this would be sweet!!! great find!

holy crap! ( yeah, that wasn't my first thought... )

what the heck have you found man???

do you know how long i've tried to acheive something similar to that via code? ( well, i wanted to drag the whole rebar control off... )

now, my question is, have you narrowed down exactly what you did to cause this? can you reproduce it?? it sounds like some sort of strange explorer glitch to me... but obviously the rebar is functional... also, i notice that each task is floating seperately.. is each task on a seperate rebar control? try out a spy window app to check.. does newly opened apps open a new floating task?? are the placements random??

does it survive a reboot?

/me wants more info !!!!!

I used to run my desktop like this, when explorer would constantly crash (pre- SP1) . A mini task manager (VERY useful) used to pop up when double-clicking the desktop with explorer killed, does it do that on 98, WinT?

methodik: Completely reproducible (Edit: for me, at least). Just kill explorer, and minimize any visible window.

interestingly enough, when you said that undefined, i remembered back to some of my first attempts with playing with litestep, where minimized tasks would do exactly that, minimize to that size of a task bar, kinda like windowmaker or something. of course, way back then, i had simply added the rc line to stop doing that, and forgot about it. many, many litestep builds later and i'm sure that it doesn't even happen any longer..

i had forgotten all about that.

however, when it comes to reproducing it, it does not happen on winME. if you kill explorer, any tasks you minimize simply disappear off screen, and you have to use the alt+tab to get them back.

i tell you, winT's ss had me going tho

i tell you, winT

in ls you can still do it as an option, not a bug
i tried on xp, couldn't get it either

You guys didn't know about this? o.O; I always thought it was nothing special. Annoying even. Same thing happes when you have certain apps as your shell. ShellCity's Go! comes to mind, but I think LiteShell does it too..

I got kinda used to it in LiteStep. Linux can reduce apps to icons, and so can litestep. Moshi's Watermark does it, and with large, tinted icons, on skinned tiles. I set them to stay on top an grew to like them. I think it's just part of the task.dll thing.

If you could use this natural feature in Explorer that would be cool. Be neat to "shade it" down to that with a button of some kind.

Well, does it survive a reboot? Certainly not Although, all I have to do is simply kill explorer, and let it relaunch as I said above. The thing is, I can't kill explorer and keep it dead, if I kill it, it just pops right the hell back up.

Now, after this is done however, ANY apps that I open from that moment on, will perform just as in the screenshot. They will NOT go to the taskbar at all. Also, I can have apps open, and maximized if I want, and it still happens. I could do it right now while typing this, and it would work just as in that screenshot, so, it just happens.

Obviously, it's some sort of glitch, I guess anyway, a bug, or whatever, but it's the coolest little bug ever to crawl on my system, lol. I kind of like it, would make for some nice screenshots! lol

I suppose though, that if you could have this working at all times, you wouldn't need the taskbar? I can't think of a need for it other then for having toolbars and such, which might would be kind of cool too. Open that space up for other things.

So, again, for 98, I simply kill explorer, it re-launches, and whalla, it's done. Oh, and undefined, nothing like you described happens for me at all

Oh, I found this other cool little app here on 98, right in the Windows folder, called "Taskman.exe" I had never worked with this thing, but it literally functions as a floating taskbar basically. It's one dialog (unhackable for some reason) has two menus on it. When the app is running, any app you open wll show up on the taskman dialog, works identical to the taskbar, and you can also call the run box from this app, and shut down windows as well. Quite interesting to say the least Others might know of this app, but me had never seen or used it before.

Isn't taskman the old Win3.x file manager?

taskman on winMe is actually pretty complete as far as a taskmanager goes... lots of options - small or large icons, text or no text, etc etc. and by playing around with the size of the window, you can get the tasks to tile in different ways.

in reshacker, the menu is hackable and the icon is replaceable, but that's about it of course.

i've always figured that it's way too clunky for my screen... what with the menubar and a full sized titlebar, it takes up a lot of room no matter what.

although, of note, is that my version must be different than yours, winT, and if you want, i could send you mine...

Yeah, I think so. Maybe you could try editing your system.ini file to load taskman.exe as your shell instead of explorer.exe and see if you can get the same effects without having to kill explorer everytime. I trust you''ll be able to put it back via dos if it doesn't work out so well.

interestingly enough - i noticed that i have 4 visual basic IDE windows open... taskman doesn't display them

teehee. now *that's* a complete taskmanager!

someone should write a program like this. it'd be so useful, you could have tasks where you want them, and alt-tabbing could still bring them up on the screen. if i knew any programming, i'd do it.

Dis is funny. That's leftover code from Windows 3.x. Try setting your shell as WINFILE.EXE and then minimizing it. Enh? See? Y'get the same effect. This is how Program Manager and MS-DOS Exec have always done it, just that the effect itself changed. It basically means that people developing new shells don't have to have any instance of task management whatsoever.

(Psst... That's just WinT's color scheme! It looks like a window that's been resized as small as possible in every other case.)

Translation: It's not new or strange, Windows has always done this, and it's always supposed to have

I don't think WinT is bullshitting us here. I remember back in the old days win98 would do that to me on occassion. Its been so long I can't remember how or why. I never really gave it any thought. However, I can see how people might get excited about it now. Just be careful, I know how most of you guys are explorer fans, you're on the verge of replacing your shell.

http://www.geocities.com/adereth_2006/look-ma-win3x-window-management.jpg (drag link into address bar)

No bullshit, probably caused when you minimize a window while explorer is busy respawning. It also happens when you're running an alternate shell that doesn't include it's own task management. Like Program Manager, for example. Go on, try it. It won't bite. Really.

(This screenshot was taken on XP by terminating the shell process, NAVI.EXE)

oh, i forgot, you can set the width of it setting MinWidth in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

This reminded me of an app I used awhile back called TaskModule. It puts a little box on your desktop you click on to bring up a popup menu of your currently running tasks. Its not skinnable or anything, but it gets the job done. The source is included, so maybe someone out there could put it to better use.

http://am-productions.yi.org/downloads.php

Great link JohnnyFist! All the apps (I've downloaded at least) have the source code included in the zip file, so just download and learn. I wish everyone would include the source in the download...

Ok, time to CLEAR things up, as usual, and as always, which shouldn't have to be cleared up, but, as always, forced to do so. So, here goes:

1) I did NOT post this thread in an effort to present something "Monumental". This was/is nothing more then a case of something happening to ME, that I did NOT know Windows was capable of. It happened, and I snapped the screenshot, plain and simple. Same goes for Taskman.exe... I personally, did NOT know the app was there, so all of this is NEW to ME. I saw it, thought it was neat, funny, etc... thought about the users here at VP, and posted it. This doesn't make ME, or anyone ELSE a dumbass for not knowing about it, I/WE just simply didn't know it was there.

2) The screenshot has NOT been altered in any way whatsoever. My color scheme has nothing to do with anything you see in that shot. The tasks are the size that they are, period. The only thing I did BEFORE snapping the screenshot was arrange the tasks in the pattern that you see in the shot, that's it. What I saw, you now see, just that simple. In other words, as JohnnyFist pointed out, there is NO "bullshit" anywhere here.

3) One can debate the ways in which this might happen, but as I've said already, this happens simply by killing explorer. I do not have to have applications minimized previous to the explorer kill. I can do it at anytime, with any apps open, doing any particulary thing, and it just works. I don't have to minimize apps as explorer is "respawning" or anything, again, it works flawlessly everytime.

4) I have not studied any Windows operating system below Windows 98, except for when I ran 95 long ago. I know nothing about 3.x, and really am not all that interested in it to be honest, as it serves me no purpose. 98 is old enough, that's as far back as I personally desire to go. So, I didn't know that this was old 3.x code, or anything to do with it at all. So as mentioned in 1), I didn't know Windows could/would/was capable of doing this, period. So it is new to ME.

So, having cleared that up... moving on to other things...

Meth... my Taskman works just the same as you described yours. I can have text, no text, small/large icons, etc... so we should have the same one.

sryo... that is an excellent idea you dished out... setting these task while on the desktop, to icons only is pretty cool man. Actually, if you think about all of this, these really are some options here, new options, or, again, new to ME

JohnnyFist... the idea of setting Taskman.exe to the shell is a pretty cool idea sir I guess I could try it, certainly wouldn't hurt anything I don't suppose

Please, report back as soon as you find out if it works or not. I recall fooling around like that awhile back and nothing ever worked properly, but then again I never thought of setting taskman as my shell. If this works, hell even if it doesn't, this thread will have been pretty exciting to me.

Ok, you can count on it man. I'm gonna do it here shortly, will report back later on tonight

does this count as alternate shell replacement?? heh...

Yes.

Ok JohnnyFist, sorry it took so long, but I have done the testing. I set "Taskman.exe" as my shell, and it worked PERFECTLY. Here's the screenshot:

Taskman

Now I must say, I couldn't function well. I had no menus of course, no taskbar, and all the damn icons came back too, and that is just a big no no. lol

I will say however, that the boot time was absolutely incredible. I already boot on average, in 10 seconds or less, but this was even quicker. A couple of the seconds from my normal 10 second boot are taken up by the explorer load when Windows hits the desktop, but that wasn't the case this time. It damn well flew into action quickly, which, me likes.

I couldn't stand to keep it like that for long though. I took the shot, and got out! lol

Anyway, there ya have it, it does work

WinT: You can set the taskman to hide its menu (right click tack bar, or click title bar icon), and then access it by right clicking on its title bar. That means it should pull up that (hackable) menu when it's as a mini-task. I could be wrong though. That could be handy to you. It's built-in stay-on-top is nice to have too.

Also, even if you leave it on large icons with text it will tile apps if the window is too small to display them downward. No scrolling, in other words.

I'm trying to contribute some of my knowledge. I used to mess wit this thing a lil, and did hack it a bit too (back when i was starting out).

That is the ultimate in minimalism. Think of all the time you'd save not having to customize anything.

Well... My idea of minimalism is this:

If can put in 20 hours of work, and when your done, it looks good but not over done, and you know when to stop.. That's minimalism. But not putting hardly any effort in isn't.... But thats just my opinion.

Yes, the ultimate in minimalism indeed it is, too minimal for me. Cut my head off, but I just happen to be satisfied I guess. i like having my taskbar, start menu, and right click menus, can't function with any less then that, plus it allows for alot of customization, WAY over 20 hours worth explicit

Oh well, point was proven though, it does work, no doubt about that.

When the tasks are run like that, you can use the registry value MinArrange to customise just how it works, take a look here

Hehe, this is actually why I came here (I'm new here BTW, hi peoples ), because I thought that MinArrange could prove fun/usefull, for example before it was set so that if explorer crashed and didn't come back tasks were hidden, but now with explorer or not I can see them

Yes, fun to play with indeed, and with the MinWidth value, you could set them to show icons only as well, as mentioned above in another post. Cool stuff indeed, and welcome to VP by the way

(Well... the color scheme does play a role, because you have your window title colo(u)r the same as yer 3d objects... so it looks like the buttons have been "pulled off" in yer screenshot, while on a 'normal' system, it just looks like a window's been scaled as small as possible. Unsurprisingly, WinAmp doesn't like this style of management.)

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