How would you make a MASTER Gui?

[mayro]

I dont know if it is a shell or what not but, I would like to take a few of the applications that are always running on my machine and combine them into one GUI.

In other words, i want to make a GUI that allows me to have most of the functions of the otherprograms without neededing to bring that program to the top of the screen.

For instance NOD32 + SYGATE FIREWALL + othersoftware
all having the parts that I would use in a little GUI addon thats called ONE, just to give it a name.

With ONE I want to be able to use the speech program that windows comes with so that it can read stuff to me from the programs. Say forinstance I start with that gui a virus scan. I want to have it report to me audioably with vocals when it is done.

To put it as simple as I can... i want a unaversal remote

 

[FireCrack]

Umm? is this relevant to halflife 2 coding?

 

[mayro]

Not terribly, but they always told me if i wanted to get into C++ id have to start somewere, figured that would be a good place to start.

 

[Physicles]

This is a complicated problem that requires detalied knowledge of the Windows API. Not a good first project if you're trying to learn C++.

The only solution I can think of is to have the universal GUI program simulate interaction with the other programs (by grabbing their window handles and sending messages to them), while their windows are hidden somehow. My guess is that this would work better for some programs than others.

You might want to start looking at such functions as EnumWindows (which lets you look up windows by window class) and SendMessage (which lets you send a message to a window if you know its handle). You'll need some version of Visual C++. Spy++ would be a very valuable tool.

Alternatively, in a few cases you might get lucky and find that the program has some sort of API you can use to communicate with it directly, like Winamp. But often this API is nonexistent, or its details are not disclosed to you, the end user.