Touch Toggle System Tray Application

<<...My EP121 Boots in 17 -18 seconds...>>

...20 seconds or less for me...

 

Is this after the following awesome tweaks by a certain person?

http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/ep1...ut-box-tweak-clean-services-applications.html

Managed 16 seconds! Naa naa mine's one second faster (Must go out more)

I'd imagine that Windows 8 and the latest mSata might even enable us to crack 10 seconds to desktop!!

 

This is just what I wanted. Thank you!

A small suggestion: Since a user can disable Touch via the Control Panel's "Pen and Touch" application (on the "Touch" panel Uncheck "Use your finger as an input device"). TouchToggle could check the status of the registry's TouchGate value on startup and set the icon accordingly (also save the startup value and restore it when the program exits).

Thanks again.

FYI, Another approach to this Touchy issue is here:
forum.tabletpcreview.com/ep121-slate/43304-remapping-home-button-switch-touchscreen-off.html

It uses the "Home" key to toggle touch input on/off. But it does not have feedback in an icon and I really like the task bar approach. Ideally the two would work together (actually they do, but the icon is not updated). So if TouchToggle saw a SendNotifyMessage(HWND_BROADCAST,WM_SETTINGCHANGE,NULL,NULL) then it could check the registry and update its icon accordingly. [Or the two applications could be combined into one with a startup option that says to hook the Home key or not.]

 

works great and it's a really clean and neat app.

thank you so much for sharing it!

 

I'll look into checking the current key setting and monitoring for that broadcast message. Since you have done the work already of figuring out what I need to listen for, adding that shouldn't be too difficult.

As for the home key, I checked out the source code for the other app and it is pretty simple so I should be able to add that as a feature to mine (enabled through right click menu or something). However, I will have to figure out how to detect keyboard input in C# since I have never done that before in C#. That may also result in my application requiring administrative privileges which I do not think it requires at the moment.

 

When I started writing the thing I was a bit nervous about it requiring UAC elevation and all that, but it turns out that I can use the low level keyboard hook without UAC. Haven't tried running it under a more limited user account, but I suspect it would work anyway.

I've decided against using C# because of the memory overhead incurred by the .NET stuff. You should be able to port a large chunk of the code over quite easily though, as you said there isn't much to the code.

 

New version is uploaded (along with updated source code) for those that are interested. It now shows the correct icon on startup and will also change to the correct icon when another application alters the setting (such as TouchToggle by mst or the Pen & Touch Windows control panel).

I did not setup my app to override the home button since I figure you can just use mst's application for that if you want and mine just for the icon since it now should respond to his application changing the setting.

http://code.google.com/p/touch-toggle/

 

I should also mention that it is more responsive now. Previously, when you clicked the icon, the application would freeze up for a few seconds (depending on how many applications you had open). To most users I am guessing this was only noticeable due to a delay between when you clicked and when the icon changed. However, it still may take a few seconds for the setting to take effect in all your applications and now you can't use the icon to tell when the setting change is finished so I am not entirely certain this is actually an improvement.

 

I love that touch toggle app... thank you very much!

 

New version uploaded that fixes a bug in which the application would show up when task switching (alt-tab / task-switch button). Now when you task switch you won't see the program in the list (it only shows up in the system tray).

touch-toggle - Toggle Windows 7 Touch Interface On/Off - Google Project Hosting