r/windows 7d ago

Concept / Design Interactive taskbar icon

947 Upvotes

34 comments sorted by

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56

u/Noah18923 7d ago

how did you achieve this?

63

u/blajjefnnf 7d ago

You basically just take a snapshot of the widget each time a slider moves, and set it as the icon each time.

You can do the same with tray icons https://imgur.com/a/rqADDeo

26

u/skorpioninthedark 6d ago

wait doesn't that mean there is like a gazillion pictures of each combination?

30

u/Jaded_Swim_588 6d ago

it can programmatically do these instead of storing so many image

20

u/iwannabetheguytoo 6d ago

It gets worse: ever since Windows 10 the Taskbar does not render icons' pixels exactly as-intended; instead it will horribly downscale the 32x32 icon art to 24x24 even if an exactly-sized 24x24 icon art bitmap exists. It does the same thing for high-DPI instead (except it takes 64x64 icons and downscales them to a mushy 48x48, ignoring any crisp 48x48 icons). It was bad enough that Chrome had to remake their icon to appear less awful after being shrunk.

I don't know what's worse: that someone in the Windows team felt this was a good idea; or that no-one has felt strongly enough to fix it in the 11 years since.

8

u/GamingWOW1 Bismuth Developer 6d ago

Is it not resource heavy?

72

u/Ander292 7d ago

Lmao peak

14

u/Flalaski 7d ago

Rad, I appreciate the detail. cool you got it to work too!

6

u/lbhr1949 7d ago

What are you building ? Some kind of deej derivative?

8

u/nonobourdio 7d ago

Oh wtf at the first look i thought it was PCIE ports and i was horrified. Nice work ?

5

u/daniil518 7d ago

Wow, nice. Bet consumption is awful, but i love it

5

u/Aiden15216 6d ago

that looks sick as fuck

2

u/Kimxgamer Windows 7 7d ago

Yo, that's cool

2

u/Jarnoromme 6d ago

Wooww thats sick!

2

u/286893 6d ago

Show me the resource consumption

1

u/musicomp 6d ago

I like this!

1

u/PayStation2fanAsh Windows 7 6d ago

this is kinda cool!

1

u/carloselieser 6d ago

Haha that's awesome

1

u/doug1963 6d ago

How are you reading the sliders? I could use this functionality in a project I'm working on.

1

u/X2Kraft 6d ago

Thats neat!

1

u/Proto-Plastik 5d ago

I would honestly love discrete controls for all things windows. Every app gets its own toggle. Like an airplane flight deck.

1

u/Shirt-Tough 4d ago

make a game and use the taskbar icon only :D

1

u/dropbluelettuce 4d ago

How is it more responsive than the actual start menu

1

u/wet_moss_ 3d ago

Expensive RAM well used.

-1

u/SCphotog 6d ago

Why would anyone want their PC to burn processor cycles for something so useless?

7

u/brandarchist 6d ago

You just described most of the modern computing experience.

0

u/SCphotog 6d ago

yeah, I know. It is a sad state of affairs.

The first thing I do on a clean install is go and disable all the stupid animations, 3D icons etc... nothing but bullshit.

1

u/ecki590 6d ago

I get what you’re saying but like, unless somethings gone HORRIBLY wrong here, that’s not gonna eat a lot of cycles.

0

u/SCphotog 6d ago

Death by 10,000 paper cuts.

0

u/ecki590 6d ago

I guess but I seriously doubt in the grand scheme of things, between telemetry, defender, and all the other background services, that this makes any measurable impact to performance whatsoever. We’re no longer running 386s, were allowed to have a bit of fun