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Screen Saver Tricks

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In a prior blog entry I describe how a couple lines of code can start the currently registered screen saver instantly and how to disable the screen saver.

Screen savers are funny animals. They are simply executable programs that typically will terminate whenever a mouse or keyboard event occurs. However, you can write a screen saver that reacts in other ways to user input.

(See Handling Screen Savers on MSDN for more info)

Run the code below, which creates a VFP Win32 executable and copies it to test.scr.

When explorer comes up, right click on test.scr and choose Install, which will install test.scr as a screen saver.

When the screen saver starts (see prior blog entry to see how to start the screen saver instantly) it presents a single textbox into which you can type VFP commands to execute.

For example, you can type “?4+5” and you have a screen saver calculator.

More interestingly, you can type these 3 lines:

PUBLIC x

x=CREATEOBJECT("internetexplorer.application")

x.Visible=1

Try hitting Alt-Tab and you can switch between your application and IE, but none of your other desktop applications (if you’re running with “On Resume Password Protect”)

One of my computers is easily visible in our home. Its screen saver is a VFP program that cycles randomly through my database of 16,000 family photos every 6 seconds. I can interactively query or search the picture data while still in screen saver mode.

*test.prg: screen saver

ERASE test.*

TEXT TO myvar TEXTMERGE noshow

      PROCEDURE test(parm1,parm2,parm3)

            PUBLIC oScreenSaver

            IF parm1="/p" &&"preview mode in the config dlog box not supported

                  RETURN

            ENDIF

            oScreenSaver=NEWOBJECT("myform")

            oScreenSaver.show()

            ON KEY LABEL f4 clear events

            READ events

            quit

     

      DEFINE CLASS myform as Form

            showwindow=2 && in desktop

            ADD OBJECT txtCmd as textbox WITH ;

                  width=SYSMETRIC(1)-100,left=100,height=30,;

                  selectonentry=1,;

                  fontsize=14,fontname="verdana"

            PROCEDURE init

                  thisform.Width=SYSMETRIC(1)

                  thisform.Height=SYSMETRIC(2)

            PROCEDURE txtCmd.valid

                  cCmd= ALLTRIM(this.value)

                  IF LEN(cCmd)>0

                        try

                              &cCmd

                              this.value=""

                        CATCH TO oErr

                              this.value=oErr.message

                              this.selectonentry=1

                        ENDTRY

                  ENDIF

      ENDDEFINE

ENDTEXT

STRTOFILE(myvar,"test.prg")

STRTOFILE("screen=off","config.fpw")

MODIFY PROJECT test nowait

_vfp.ActiveProject.Files.Add("test.prg")

_vfp.ActiveProject.Files.Add("config.fpw")

_vfp.ActiveProject.Close

BUILD EXE test FROM test

ERASE config.fpw

*!/n test

COPY FILE test.exe TO test.scr

*MODIFY COMMAND startssave nowait

!start . && start Explorer in the curdir

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2005
    Sometimes it’s useful to run some code in response to an event like somebody locking or unlocking your...
  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2006
    yes
  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2006
    I think it's great. I wish I had theose programming skills as My system locks up or crashes when I enable the Windows XP screensaver. Any ideas or solutions?
  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2007
    I have 23,000 digital pictures and movies taking many gigabytes of storage from the past decade or so.