Creeper - A Heads-Up Notification Script

[MarkRobbins]

Creeper v0.1.1

Creeper is a 'heads up display' notification window that appears at the bottom of the screen and moves to the top and fades away.
It is a window that is semi-transparent, and transparent to clicks.
Creeper is not a UDF, but rather a stand-alone script to be invoked from the command line or another script.
Many notifications can be launched this way in succession without complications.

Pressing right ctrl and left ctrl will remove all notifications from the screen at any time.

Creeper uses an embedded IE object and is thereby capable of rich html-based notifications.

The html framework provided consists of:

1. An optional title
2. An optional image
3. An optional html body (any html you want)

The content parameters are:

• title
• html
• image

Full styling for the framework involves parameters:

• bordercolor, borderwidth, borderstyle, padding, width
• backgroundcolor, color
• font, fontsize
• titlefont, titlecolor
• imagewidth, imageheight

Special parameters are:

• fmtini
• fmtname
• outhtml
• autodel

 

Specifying Command Line Parameters

Specification is made easy by using named parameters, so the command line parameters can look like:
  "name1[,name2]..." "<value for name1>" "<value for name2>"

Parameters for a simple message could look like:
  "title,html" "My Title" "Some html with <b>markup</b>"

To make this even easier, a formatting ini file can be referenced, and parameter values picked up from there:
  "title,html,fmtini,fmtname" "My Title" "Some html with <b>markup</b>" "C:some.ini" "sectionname"

Even more, a registry key can be used for all parameters:
  "2013.07.28.14.37.12.722"

Templating is also supported, so if you have a html value that looks like:
  Hi, my name is %(name)

...then your command line can look like:
  "fmtini,fmtname,title,$name" "C:some.ini" "sectionname" "My Title" "George"

where the html value in this case is picked up from the ini


The other great feature of Creeper is that it can log its messages to a specific point in any html file:
  "html,outhtml" "Log this html" "C:some.html"
 

Next Steps

Examine the code comment header. The file will run without parameters using internal defaults. Let me know if you have any issues or have any solutions to the issues given.

Caveats
  Its v0.1, so read the issues in the comments. The functions do not have thorough documentation headers since this is not a UDF, but the functions are simple and have single line explanations. Also, not a lot of error handling going on at this stage

History

Edit - Update to v0.1.1

 

TestCreeper.au3
 

Edited July 29, 2013 by MarkRobbins

[jaberwacky]

Could you capture a screen of this in action?  I'm kinda lazy.  Sorry.

[MarkRobbins]

Here is a screen cap.

[robertcollier4]

Instead of hard coding paths such as "C:batchborgTestCreeper.au3", you could use @ScriptDir and @ScriptFullPath. Then people could try it out on their own computers.

http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/macros.htm

Also checkout Firefox's function _GuiRoundCorners if you want to make to make your notification boxes have rounded corners:

Edited July 29, 2013 by robertcollier4

[MarkRobbins]

Instead of hard coding paths such as "C:batchborgTestCreeper.au3", you could use @ScriptDir and @ScriptFullPath. Then people could try it out on their own computers.

http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/macros.htm

Also checkout Firefox's function _GuiRoundCorners if you want to make to make your notification boxes have rounded corners:

Yes, those paths are a bit misleading. They are not referenced unless there is logging going on. They are leftovers from my text-expansion from back in the day when I didn't know about those macros.

Thanks for the tip on round corners, once I get IE to do it in the html, then I can do it with the form, but I still need to get the control placement right, I will probably have to get scrollbar width from SPI in order for IEs scrollbar to be hidden correctly on all machines. All that part is still pretty shaky.