Hi!
Dear Squeakers,
I have always had a hard time learning anything until I had a project to do it around. Well that time has come.
I need to write an app. that will let me run one application inside another. I would like to have a cad type app. running in a window and then be able to over lay that cad app. with another app. that lets me put hot spots on the cad app.
[SNIP]
As far as I can tell you want to run a regular app (on win32?) and then let Squeak "draw" on top of it to visually outline specific areas etc.
- Can the Squeak helper app presume that the CAD app is looking the same and being positioned on the desktop in such a manner that the positions do not change? Otherwise you need to do "visual analysis" and that's hard.
- Squeak normally only draws inside its own window but there are FFI (foreign function interface) examples of using Win32 GDI (or other platform specific graphical calls) to draw outside the window "directly on the desktop". This might be sufficient for your needs.
- I have a faint recollection that wxSqueak (now seemingly stalled) could do stuff outside the window, but I may be wrong.
- Another approach is to "bring the app into Squeak" using VNC or X11 or such, I guess the Croqueteers knows more about this since they do it in Croquet. Possibly your best bet is to write this in Croquet, it would also give you lots of other cool "educational" stuff.
regards, Göran