Window Sizer

• Download installer - 149 Kb
• Download binary - 110 Kb
• Download source - 12 Kb

Overview

Window Sizer is a little program that I wrote when I was having to frequently change screen resolutions when testing web pages or GUI applications to make sure that they worked alright in other resolutions than my default one. Often we also had requests from clients with weird specifications like a maximum window size of 600 x 600 or something equally bizarre. Then I found that when I was editing CP articles I had to switch to 800 x 600 to make sure that the article looked fine in that resolution too. All this culminated in this little app that you see.

Usage

Just run the app once, probably at windows startup. Just drag a short cut to the Start-Menu's Startup-folder. You'll see a green tree icon on your system tray. That's to let you know that Window Sizer is active. Now just make your window active by clicking on it and press CTRL-ALT-F12 which is the keyboard shortcut that brings up Window Sizer. Now you can choose one of the resolutions from the list box or use a custom resolution, and then click on Resize to resize the window to that size. If you close the Window Sizer window the program won't exit, it simply hides itself. The resolution list in the list box will never exceed your screen resolution. Thus if you are on 800 x 600, don't expect to see 720 x 720 in the list box. But you can type what you feel like into the Custom size text boxes at your own risk of course. You can exit the program by right clicking on the task tray and choosing Exit.

Technical details

Basically we use GetForegroundWindow() to get the current window. This usually works better than GetActiveWindow() on XP and 2K because they have some kind of funny option that when set prevents windows from taking over the focus. This means we end up with crazy situations where the foreground window may not be the active window and vice versa. Now we use MoveWindow() to resize the window. If the resizing gets the window out of screen, we center the window on the screen. We also remove the WS_MAXIMIZE if it is set because otherwise the OS will not know that the window has been un-maximized. Initially I had over-looked such a contingency and had experienced some weird side effects.

Conclusion

I'd like to thank David Wulff and Roger Wright for doing some quick testing for me. It was okay when I alone was using it, but when I thought of CP-ing it, I wanted some external testing and these two gentlemen helped me by testing out the application. Of course there might be a few bugs left for all I know. But I am hoping on getting some quality feedback and suggestions as usual.

Updates

• Aug 08 2002 - Added an MSI Installer