Brass Plugins: Mime
Cross Application Gestures
There is one extremely shiny feature of Mime that
you might not have noticed yet, and it deserves a section all of
its own. When we created a custom application and action, one of
the Wizard pages was the directive page:
As you now know, this is where you tell Mime what
to do for each custom action. You make your gesture in an application
(like Notepad), Mime sees the custom action attached to the gesture
and performs whatever actions you tell it to in the directives section.
There's one directive that is extremely powerful
- the "Set Target Window" directive.
Set Target Window
So far we've seen how to tell an application to
do something when you make a gesture in it. But what about making
an entirely separate application do something when you make a gesture?
- How about making a gesture in Internet Explorer causing WinAmp
to load a new MP3?
- How about a gesture in MS Word causing Trillian to connect to
MSN?
- How about a gesture in Dreamweaver causing Paintshop Pro to
load a bitmap?
SetTargetWindow can do all this and more. Cool,
huh!
The purpose of SetTargetWindow is to say to Mime:
"I don't want to you
to send any more directives to the application I made the gesture
in. Instead I want you to find
another application and send all these other directives to it instead"
When you select "Directive: Set Target Window"
this is what you'll see in the directive page of the Custom Action
Wizard:
SetTargetWnd takes 2 parameters. The first parameter
- class name - is the explicitly matched class name of the top level
window to send all subsequent directives to. The second parameter
- window title - is the pattern matched string to look for in the
titles of all top level windows. Class names and window titles are
discussed in detail in the Creating
Good Criteria section.
You can supply one or both of these parameters
to enhance the window matching process.
Here's a brief example. Let's say we are creating
a custom action for Notepad that tells WinAmp to start playing.
Follow the steps in the Creating
a Custom Application and Action walkthrough until you get to
the directive page in the Wizard.
Now we want to tell Mime that this gesture affects
WinAmp, not Notepad. The first thing we need to do is to find the
class name and window title of WinAmp. We can do this with a window
spy tool, the window finder tool or with the Mime
secret gesture. Here's the output from the secret gesture:
Great, this will be an easy one. Matching on explicit
classnames is always better, so we'll use the class name of "Winamp
v1.x". We don't need to match on a window title (if we wanted
to though, we could pattern match on a window title of "Winamp")
Back to the directives page in the Custom Action
Wizard. We add the SetTargetWnd directive, and give it the WinAmp
classname like this:
Take a close look at this screenshot. We've provided
the exact classname for WinAmp and left the window title field blank.
When the "Add This Directive" button was clicked, the
Custom Action Wizard automatically put a "0" in the window
title field to signify it's not needed.
Now every directive after the SetTargetWnd directive
will be sent to WinAmp. According to the WinAmp docs the keyboard
shortcut to start playing an MP3 is simply to press "x".
Let's add that.
Select "Keyboard: Simple Keypress" from
the directive type combobox, type "x" in the "Keypresses
to send" field and click "Add This Directive". The
complete directive string will now look like this:
Easy enough! That's all it takes, once you add
this custom action you can control WinAmp from gestures in Notepad!
Of course the same principle applies to all other
applications. Even if the criteria for your custom application is
all blank (in other words, actions for all applications), you can
control other applications through the SetTargetWnd directive.
RestoreTargetWnd - SetTargetWnd's
best friend
The magic doesn't end there though. SetTargetWnd
lets you ignore where you made a gesture and change the application
to send directives to. But what if you want to do both?
An example works best. Let's say you wanted to
make a gesture in Internet Explorer that plays an MP3 in WinAmp,
then does a File - Print back in Internet Explorer. This is where
RestoreTargetWnd comes in.
RestoreTargetWnd sets the "focus" of
Mime back to the application you made the gesture in, for all subsequent
directives.
File - Print is "ALT-F" then "p",
so the directive line would look like this:
Let's split that down a bit:
| SETTARGETWND(Winamp v1.x, 0) |
Set the window to receive input to WinAmp |
| |
|
| %% |
Command delimiter |
| |
|
| x |
Send an X to WinAmp - the keyboard shortcut
to start playing |
| |
|
| %% |
Command delimiter |
| |
|
| RESTORETARGETWND() |
Set the window to receive input back to the
one the gesture was made in |
| |
|
| %% |
Command delimiter |
| |
|
| [ALT]f[/ALT] |
Send a ALT-F keypress (open the File menu) |
| |
|
| %% |
Command delimiter |
| |
|
| p |
Send a P to the original window to access the
"Print" menu option |
| |
|
You can use as many SetTargetWnd and RestoreTargetWnd directives
as you want in one directive line. Controlling 5, 10 or 20 apps
with one single gesture is easy!
|
