how to achieve one main menu including two programs?

advanced
#1

Hello everyone~

I need to start up a main program: a.exe,
this main program a.exe shows a main menu with two button,
if pressing the first button, it’ll trigger program b.exe,
pressing the second button, program c.exe will be triggered.

Does anybody know how to achieve this requirement?
thanks a lot!!!

#2

hey,

you can use OSC. have a look at the OSC examples under examples/addons.

greetings,
felix

#3

Thanks felix,
actually I need to run the three programs on one computer,
and all of them must be full screen, that is a.exe first running
for waiting user selection, after picking one menu button, system
triggers b/c.exe to run full screen, after finishing, screen will back
to a.exe main menu.

kaykay

#4

hey kaykay,

using any kind of network protocols doesn’t mean that you must work on different machines. using TUIO to send multitouch events from one program to another on the same machine is often used - for example between processing and openframeworks or in general between your tracking program and your application. using OSC for button events works the same.

you have to use the internal default network adress 127.0.0.1 or localhost. your program A should broadcast the button event and B and C have to decide if the event is addressed to them by themselves. just put the name or id of the receiver into the event/message.

to trigger full screen you can use ofToggleFullscreen()

hope this helps

#5

Thanks felix~

Well, the problem is : how to control the toppest window?
After I select exactly one program, it must be showed on toppest
which overlays the other two windows.

kaykay

#6

my hope was that toggleFullscreen() would solve this too but never tested it. sorry

#7

Hi KayKay,

since you mentioned .exe file I’m assuming you are working on a windows machine. I’ve used nircmd in the past for automating and managing some application windows. Nircmd is an additional set of windows commands you can use for system functions. A full set of commands can be found @ http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html I think that these commands may be of the most interest to you :

Make your Internet Explorer windows 75% transparent ! (192 / 256) nircmd.exe win trans ititle “internet explorer” 192
Minimize all your Internet Explorer windows nircmd.exe win min class “IEFrame”
Hide all your Internet Explorer windows nircmd.exe win hide class “IEFrame”
Show all your Internet Explorer windows (after you made them hidden with previous example) nircmd.exe win show class “IEFrame”

You should be able to swap out the titles of windows and control almost anything you can think of.

You can call system commands with

  
 system( "pathToScript.bat" );

this forum post has more detailed information : http://forum.openframeworks.cc/t/calling-a-python-script-from-of/3303/0

hope that helps !