Hello,

Problem: display a countdown timer on the screen that is transparent (except for text) and will display on top of any application(s) or game(s) running fullscreen or not.

Possible Solution: Utilize the same technology that can display volume information on top of the windows display when you use the volume controls on some keyboards. This could also be the same technology used when you access monitor settings.

Examples of applications that do this:
Subliminal Flash - http://www.programurl.com/subliminal-flash.htm a free application that displays subliminal messages at extremely fast intervals on the screen. This is the best example of what we are trying to achieve except our message would last a whole lot longer than messages in this application and they would also be dynamic (countdown timer)

FRAPS - http://www.fraps.com/ A program used to capture video of games. The programs displays a FPS counter on top of the games while it's recording. This is done by hijacking the directX functions, but this will only work on a directX window and isn't a good solution for us since it will also have to display while normally using Windows.

An image of what we want it to look like is here: http://www.sugarimaging.com/images/test.jpg


Thanks for any help or advice you can give me on technology or a solution that could accomplish this. I have been scouring the internet for a solution and haven't been able to find anything.

Tim

Hello tajjyarden,

If you are using Visual C++, I would suggest implementing a transparent window with text drawn on the inside. http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/frameworks/advancedui/windowingtechniquesandclasses/article.php/c3213/ is is an article describing how to go about creating a transparent window.

I hope I've been of some help!

Hi Brenton,

Thanks for the suggestion! After looking into this I don't know if this would be able to accomplish our task. From what I can tell, if you make the window transparent, you make everything inside of it transparent too. Also it looks like that solution will only work for Windows 2000 and we will be running XP.

Thanks!
Tim

Transparent (layered) windows were introduced with Win2K but are definitely still alive and well in XP.