XCPClock - CodeProject Clock

• Download demo project - 440.76 KB

Introduction

After finishing my XAnalogClock article, I wanted free-floating clock to use on my desktop. XCPClock is implemented using SetLayeredWindowAttributes, which is available in Win 2000 and later.

Features

The right-click menu allows you to set transparency, always on top, second hand, and choose a skin:

Skins

Here are the skins available:

Transparency

Transparency setting allows you to make underlying window partially visible:

When transparency setting is not fully opaque (less than 255), left-clicks and left-double-clicks will be passed on to underlying window (click-thru). However, even when transparency is enabled (less than 255), you can still use right-click to bring up popup menu, and you can still move clock by dragging (holding down left mouse button while moving mouse).

The Transparent Silver Ring and Transparent Minimal skins offer another transparency option: the clock face itself is completely transparent (except for center pivot, date box, and (for Transparent Silver Ring) the outer ring), so you can click on any window beneath the XCPClock. For these two skins, the minute- and hour-hand color changes automatically, depending on color of underlying window, so as to maintain good visibility (thanks to John Simmons' excellent article Determining Ideal Text Color Based on Specified Background Color).

The Transparency Dialog gives some tips on setting the transparency:

Command Line Options

Sometimes just one clock isn't enough. I often deal with people in different time zones, and it's handy to be able to look at clock that shows time at their location:

To display the above "clock rack," I use this cmd file:

  start XCPClock.exe -s crystalgreen -h -3 -t Honolulu -x 400 -y 300 -w 1
  start XCPClock.exe -s crystalblue -t "Los Angeles" -x 501 -y 300 -w 1
  start XCPClock.exe -s cpbob -h +3 -t Toronto -x 602 -y 300 -w 1
  start XCPClock.exe -s crystalblack -h +9 -t Berlin -x 703 -y 300 -w 1

Here are available command line options:

Synchronized Move

Once you have multiple XCPClocks displayed, you may find that you need to move them. To facilitate this, clicking and dragging any XCPClock that has been started with command line options will cause all other XCPClocks to move in sync. You can move an XCPClock independently by holding down the Ctrl key while dragging the XCPClock.

Global Close

To make displaying multiple XCPClocks more manageable, there is a selection on the right-click menu to allow you to close all running XCPClocks.

Implementation Notes

Transparent Click-thru

The most requested enhancement of the original XCPClock was transparent click-thru. This means that clicks on XCPClock would be passed through to the underlying window, as if XCPClock wasn't there. The value of this is obvious - to set transparency in XCPClock, and then be able to operate windows on screen, without having to move XCPClock out of the way.

Some readers actually suggested an easy solution: just add WS_EX_TRANSPARENT style to the dialog. Here is what MSDN says about WS_EX_TRANSPARENT:

OK, that sounds good in theory. In practice, a real disaster. The effect of adding WS_EX_TRANSPARENT style is to make XCPClock completely inaccessible to user. It won't receive any mouse or keyboard input. You can't right-click it, or move it by dragging. The "suggested" solution for this problem? Use global mousehook. In my opinion, this is truly evil. Another solution that is sometimes used is to create tray icon, to allow back-door UI operations when app cannot respond.

Since use of WS_EX_TRANSPARENT was out of the question, I decided to do it myself. The first thing was to define how I wanted click-thrus to work. They had to work for left mouse button, but not for right button - the right-click popup menu needed to work. And click-thrus should not work at all unless transparency is enabled (this meant transparency setting of less than 255).

I knew the key to getting click-thrus to work was in sending right message to right window. In this case, right message was obviously WM_LBUTTONDOWN, and right window was the one lying directly underneath XCPClock. But how to find it? I knew one thing that MSDN documentation doesn't say; I knew that EnumWindows() enumerated windows according to their z-order (the order that they appear on screen, from topmost to bottommost). This made it easy to find right window - I just continued enumeration until I found the first window (not XCPClock!) that contained the click point. Since XCPClock was on top of other windows, this guaranteed that window would be the one directly underneath XCPClock.

Now that I had window's HWND, what next? My overly optimistic thinking was to just send WM_LBUTTONDOWN message, followed by WM_LBUTTONUP. No matter how I tried to do this, it didn't work. Fortunately, there's another technique, almost as simple as sending a message: the SendInput() function. Of course, when I tried this, it didn't work either. It took me a while to realize that the click was being sent to XCPClock itself, since it was at top of z-order! After a little experimenting with moving XCPClock out of the way, etc., I got sequence down to as few steps as possible:

1. Find the underlying window.
2. Hide the XCPClock window using ShowWindow().
3. Call SendInput() to send button down and button up events.
4. Un-hide XCPClock with another call to ShowWindow().

To my surprise, doing these steps in the right order worked on both XP and Vista. The only (slight) downside was brief flicker when XCPClock was being hidden and un-hidden, which I now claim is a feature.

Synchronized Move

When you have used a cmd file to display several XCPClocks on screen at exact position you want, sooner or later you will want to move them. It happened to me so many times that I realized it was going to be problem for XCPClock users. I thought, wouldn't it be nice to be able to click on one of the XCPClocks and drag it somewhere, and all other XCPClocks would move with it? So I began to think of ways I could accomplish this.

The first thing that came to mind was sending messages among running XCPClock apps. I knew I could find all running XCPClock apps by simply enumerating windows, as I discussed above. Then I could use MoveWindow() to move XCPClock to a new location. While I'm sure this would work, it was not what I wanted. I wanted to move only those XCPClocks that had been started with command line options. Now things were getting complicated. After enumerating windows, I would have to send a message to each XCPClock, telling it to move itself if it was started with command line options.

Now I am going to let you in on one of my secrets. Here is how I did all the things I just mentioned, by sending only one message. The message is a unique registered windows message; it's registered because I want to broadcast it. So what's the secret? It's how I send the message - via SendMessageCallback(), which has got to be one of least-known Win32 APIs:

This sounds deceptively simple. Consider what's happening:

1. I call one API to initiate the process.
2. I use registered window message that is broadcast via HWND_BROADCAST to all top-level windows.
3. I get response from every top-level app. However, only XCPClock apps respond with predetermined code (which happens by coincidence to be my CodeProject user ID). This tells me two things: first, it tells me which responses are valid - i.e., from XCPClock app that has been started with command line options; and second, it gives me HWND of XCPClock app.

Here is the call to SendMessageCallback():

    ::SendMessageCallback(HWND_BROADCAST, WM_XCPCLOCK_INIT, 0, 0, 
        SendAsyncProc, (ULONG_PTR) m_hWnd);

Each XCPClock has its own message handler for registered message WM_XCPCLOCK_INIT:

LRESULT CXCPClockDlg::OnXCPClockInit(WPARAM /*wParam*/, LPARAM /*lParam*/)
{
    TRACE(_T("in CXCPClockDlg::OnXCPClockInit: 0x%X\n"), m_hWnd);

    if (__argc > 1)
        return 15759;  // respond to broadcast message with a unique code,
                       // if started with command line options
    else
        return 0;
}

and here is my implementation of SendAsyncProc():

void CALLBACK SendAsyncProc(HWND hWnd,        // handle to destination window
                            UINT uMsg,        // message
                            ULONG_PTR dwData, // application-defined value
                            LRESULT lResult)  // result of message processing
{
    TRACE(_T("in SendAsyncProc:  hWnd=0x%X  lResult=%d\n"), hWnd, lResult);

    HWND me = (HWND) dwData;

    if ((uMsg == WM_XCPCLOCK_INIT) && (hWnd != me) && (lResult == 15759))
    {
        // this callback is from a XCPClock app
        TRACE(_T("adding 0x%X\n"), hWnd);
        g_hWndArray.Add(hWnd);
    }
}

The HWNDs collected in this way are stored in an array - this only happens once. Using an array of HWNDs, I then move other XCPClock apps whenever user drags the current app.

Global Close

When I was testing Synchronized Move, I quickly became tired of repeatedly closing each XCPClock. So I decided to implement a Global Close, which would close all running XCPClocks. This was fairly simple to do, because I knew how to enumerate all windows, and furthermore I knew that XCPClock had a unique class name which I could use to find running XCPClocks.

This unique class name was implemented by hand-editing XCPClock.rc, and adding CLASS field to dialog template, as highlighted below:

IDD_XCPCLOCK_DIALOG DIALOGEX 0, 0, 92, 70
STYLE WS_POPUP | WS_VISIBLE
EXSTYLE WS_EX_APPWINDOW
CLASS "TheCodeProjectClock"
FONT 8, "MS Sans Serif", 0, 0, 0x1
BEGIN
    LTEXT           "",IDC_FRAME,0,0,90,70
END

Once the dialog template was modified, the unique class name could be used to register new class for XCPClock dialog:

BOOL CXCPClockApp::InitApplication() 
{
    WNDCLASS wc;
    
    wc.style = CS_DBLCLKS | CS_SAVEBITS | CS_BYTEALIGNWINDOW;
    wc.lpfnWndProc = DefDlgProc;
    wc.cbClsExtra = 0;
    wc.cbWndExtra = DLGWINDOWEXTRA;
    wc.hInstance = AfxGetInstanceHandle();
    wc.hIcon = LoadIcon(IDR_MAINFRAME);
    wc.hCursor = ::LoadCursor(NULL, IDC_ARROW);
    wc.hbrBackground = (HBRUSH)COLOR_WINDOW + 1;
    wc.lpszMenuName = NULL;
    wc.lpszClassName = _T("TheCodeProjectClock");
    ::RegisterClass(&wc);
    
    return CWinApp::InitApplication();
}

Now I could use this unique class name to find running XCPClocks. First, I began window enumeration:

void CXCPClockDlg::OnCloseAll() 
{
    ::EnumWindows(EnumWindowsProcCloseAll, (LPARAM)m_hWnd);
    GetParent()->SendMessage(WM_CLOSE);    // close this instance
}

In the enumeration function, I check for unique class name:

BOOL CALLBACK EnumWindowsProcCloseAll(HWND hWnd,    // handle to window
                                     LPARAM lParam) // HWND of caller
{
    HWND me = (HWND) lParam;

    if (hWnd == me)
    {
        // this is my window - ignore
        return TRUE;
    }

    TCHAR szClassName[100];
    ::GetClassName(hWnd, szClassName, sizeof(szClassName)/sizeof(TCHAR)-1);
    szClassName[sizeof(szClassName)/sizeof(TCHAR)-1] = 0;

    if (_tcsicmp(szClassName,  _T("TheCodeProjectClock")) == 0)
    {
        TRACE(_T("closing window 0x%X\n"), hWnd);
        ::SendMessage(::GetParent(hWnd), WM_CLOSE, 0, 0);
    }

    return TRUE;
}

Note that the WM_CLOSE message is sent to dialog's parent, which is actually an invisible window that is created in CXCPClockApp::InitInstance(); this keeps XCPClock from showing up on the task bar.

Acknowledgments

• Antialiasing: Wu Algorithm by .Suchit
• Determining Ideal Text Color Based on Specified Background Color by John Simmons
• Thanks to my Traser watch for giving me the inspiration for the neon blue skin.

References

• XAnalogClock - a skinnable analog clock
• XHyperLink - yet another hyperlink control

Revision History

Version 1.1 - 2008 August 23

• Minor bug fixes
• Changed to automatic link to msimg32.lib (previously you had to add this lib to the project link modules)
• Added new skins
• Added click-thru when transparency is enabled (less than 255)
• Added shortcuts for setting transparency
• Added automatic hand color for new transparent clock faces
• Added command line options
• Added synchronized move
• Added global close option to popup menu
• Added option to show/hide second hand
• Added VS2005 project

Version 1.0 - 2006 March 24

• Initial public release.

Usage

This software is released into the public domain. You are free to use it in any way you like, except that you may not sell this source code. If you modify it or extend it, please to consider posting new code here for everyone to share. This software is provided "as is" with no expressed or implied warranty. I accept no liability for any damage or loss of business that this software may cause.