Hi all. Been playing with LiteStep for a couple years, off and on. I have to say that I really do love what it can do, but I am still a little too inexperienced to create my own theme to support my three monitor setup...

Anyhow, I was wondering if it had ever been attempted to use LiteStep's "desktop" as an interactive interface for a touchscreen, or even if it can be done. I simply don't know enough about its capabilities myself.

What I am trying to do is to build a carPC with a touchscreen, and I would like to be able to write my own modules to control installed programs, without having to actually use the programs themselves, (such as the various Winamp modules available). I would like to have a desktop that didn't have a taskbar, but that had buttons that can be "clicked" to trigger and control programs. I hope I'm wording this right. I need to create a central interface with embedded control for other programs. I've been trying to read up on the hotspots module, but I can't tell if this is what I think it is. Does that module allow the programmer to create "clickable" areas on the screen?

My apologies if this has been covered, but I'm new to this forum, and I can't seem to get the search to bring up anything about what I'm looking for. I'm hoping one of you might know what I'm talking about.

Thanks! :)

hotspots only enable you to launch bang commands when the mouse enters or leaves an area covered by the hotspot, so nothing "clickable" here.

if i understand you right, you want to have an interface to control all kinds of programs. this cannot be done by litestep or it's modules (anyone correct me if i'm wrong). as for the winamp example: winamp has an "interface" itself that allows to control it by modules for example, but most applications don't have this feature.
so in conclusion i think it is impossible to realise your idea, however i like it :)

Someone had designed a theme years and years ago to do this actually and it worked. The touch screen just acts as a mouse so its no biggy.

Hmmm.. well, so there is hope... sort of. See, what I'm working on now is a VB program that controls Winamp and Windows Media Player for media playback, as well as some GPS and security controls. In VB, theoretically at least, I can "embed" the program windows into my own application, thereby centralizing control of them within one interface. Problem is, I know just enough VB to get me into trouble, and I was hoping for a way to cut back the overhead on the processor by having the shell itself act as the interface itself.

Anybody have a clue what the name of that theme was that was made years and years ago? (Is LiteStep really old enough to warrant "years and years"?! Wow.)

you can do the touchscreen interface part of this very easily... all you need is a few shortcuts. you wouldnt really need a vb script for the media player part of it as long as you use winamp and the litestep module dynamp, and if the other programs can do what you want from the command line, you shouldnt have any problems - just run the command from the shortcut.

but as elkmonster said, if the program doesnt provide a way to interact with it except through the program itself, litestep cant really do much with it. im not sure what vb is capable of, but it doesnt sound too easy.

you could check out spy++ and sendmessage.dll to see if you could emulate certain messages the programs recieve, but if the program doesnt have a message for the function you are looking for, youre out of luck there.

basically, what im saying is that litestep can do it, the problem is whether the other programs can. winamp was written to, but not all programs are that friendly.

Bummer. Ok, so Winamp is in the club. I wonder if I could create a media player to replace Windows Media Player instead, and make it addressable via commandline... Hmmm...

Thanks for the info all!

Winamp3 has video playback which would dump the need for WMP.

Deadweasel, you can create a shortcut-based theme (ie, have a bunch of shortcuts to launch your various functions)

In that touch-screens just send standard mouse messages you won't have to worry about anything more complicated than placing your shortcuts, assigning them images and actions, and building the CarPC itself ;)

As for video playback, Winamp5 has it I believe, and CrystalPlayer and ZoomPlayer both take command-line arguments and are available free by doing a google search.

BSPlayer and Media Player Classic can be controlled quite effectively from the keyboard, and simulating keyboard input is fairly easy. (MPC might be useful, as it can play quicktime and realplayer stuff)

ummm... winamp2 has video playback as well...

Yes, I know WA2 has video (later versions), BUT it's nowhere near as smooth as what WA5 seems to be pulling off!!

another option is vlc, which is a media player that can be controlled from the command line... its pretty nice too