My brief requires me to control itunes through a Java Program and must work on either OS X or Windows.
From my research it seems most people's Windows Control uses the Itunes/COM SDK over a COM bridge, and Mac control uses Applescript.
Thing is I can't seem to find a way to develop this to be truely cross platform, because the libraries I need for OSX seems to be inbuilt and non-accessible from windows.
So I was wondering if anyone had a solution, or another cross platform way to control iTunes from either operating system?
If you just need some commands like Play, pause, stop, next etc. you could try just to simulate a global keyPress event and sent the right KeyCode (for the multimedia Keys). In Java you can use JNI to call a simple C program which will simulates a Keypress for you...or you look at the Robot class in Java.
In windows the function is called: keybd_event(keycode,0,0,0);
The only problem is that other programs (if started) would probably also react to the multimedia keypresses.
Related
I code in java. I wrote a keylistener for the frame and it prints all the keystrokes when the frame is active, but when i minimize it or deactivate it, the program obviously stops and no keystrokes are printed. I wanted to make a small game where i enter a key and using the robot class, it presses another set of keys but this game is in flash. any idea as to how i would capture keystrokes when window is deactivated.
edit: I only code in java so is it possible using only java or at most combining it with native machine... i use windows
By its nature, Java is sandboxed by the JVM, so you will have to incorporate some kind of native methods. There already exists a very flexible and helpful library to accomplish this under open source, called JNativeHook. It's very easy to hook in, especially if you're already familiar with Swing event handlers. Same basic concept, except it leverages native code written in C. It supports all of the basic operating systems (Windows, Mac, *Nix).
I have some java code that I use on a windows machine that runs as a service and has a tray icon that I want to port to Mac OS X. From what I can tell there is no good way to make a menu bar icon using java, so I want to basically wrap my java code with objective-c so I can have a nice menu bar icon and still interact with the java code as I am able to when running the code on my windows box. Is there a good way to do this?
My java code makes web requests every so often so the main functionality I'm looking for is to start/stop the web client, as well as receive updates from the java code on the status of the web requests (more or less push notifications).
Thanks for your help everyone!
If all you're trying to do is get your application's icon displayed in the Dock & the Finder, you don't need to write an objective-C wrapper; all you need to do is bundle the Java code up in with the icons in an OS X "application bundle". See Apple's Java Deployment Guide
You might also want to look into the com.apple.eawt package (see questions/1319805/java-os-x-dock-menu), which provides some features to allow a Java app to appear more like a native OS X application to the user (for example, supporting drag-and-dropping a file to the application icon).
How can I disable OS-level keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Alt-Left/Right, etc.) on a [Ubuntu] Linux machine? I'm developing a full-screen Java Swing app and don't want the user to be able to task switch away from the program arbitrarily. It's not enough to toggle the "always on top" flag; users mustn't be allowed to switch workspaces, migrate focus or any other such things. The machine must function normally before and after the application is executed. Google says that this will require JNI or JNA but I'm looking for a bit more hand-holding.
There's no point in trying to do this in your application because any of these changes are going to need to be handled by X11 and/or the window manager since those are what respond to the commands. Assuming that you have control of the platform, choose a window manager which supports a kiosk mode. Then use the window manager's settings to start your application and enter kiosk mode.
Options for window managers which can do this include KDE or twm-kiosk.
(And if you don't have control of the platform, you're not likely to be able to have your application intercept things like ctrl-alt-backspace anyway.)
Edit:
In response to a scaled-down version of the question in which he's willing to let things like ctl-alt-backspace go and just wants most of the keys including alt-tab or other similar application switching key combinations, the following should work:
You should be able to do this using XLib's XGrabKeyboard method through JNI. This Java/XLib JNI keypress capture tutorial should be a good starting point. However, it uses XGrabKey which just passively listens for keys and does not prevent other applications from receiving them. You'll instead want to use XGrabKeyboard which actively snags all of the normal keyboard events (which, if the premise of this StackOverflow question is correct, includes the task switching keys).
Note that as a side-effect, key capture in Swing will also probably stop working because your Swing windows are going to be separate from the window you create in C. As such, you will probably have to use your JNI interface to get key presses to your program when needed. (Although I would definitely advise testing it first before writing the code.) You might be able to avoid this if you can get the window using Java AWT Native Interface to get the window ID. (Note that Swing is built on top of AWT, so this will work for Swing.) However, I'm not sure how to do this. It looks like you might be able to navigate the window tree by getting the root window from the Display and going from there to find your Window, but it's all kind of weird. It would be nice if the AWT NI just told you the window ID, but it doesn't look like it does that.
As this warning Reminder: XGrabKeyboard is not a security interface notes, this doesn't make it impossible for other programs to see the keys, but it seems likely that window managers will not be using XQueryKeyMap so it is likely to prevent task switching.
History & Situation:
I'm currently working on updating a Java application that was developed for a client several years ago (to run on WinXP) and is used for testing and training people with certain hearing impairments. Users who bought this application were provided with a particular USB sound device and headphones.
One of the most important requirements for this software is that the audio must be played to the user at specific decibel sound levels. Using the Java Sound API, the application was developed to dynamically adjust the Windows Volume to calculated levels (based on measurements made when calibrating the USB sound device & headphones during development).
Problem:
The application now needs to be upgraded to support Windows Vista and Windows 7, however due to Windows' new per-app sound architecture, I've been unable to find any way to access the Master/System volume using the Java Sound API.
The application's windows volume control alone doesn't cut it since it's relative to the system volume and there's no way to guarantee that the user will hear the output audio at a specific, known level.
Does anybody know if it is even possible to do this in Java and if so then how? If it's not possible, then can you give any guidance on what might be the simplest way to achieve it? (JNI and C perhaps - though I've never used JNI before... any gotchas to be aware of?)
If you run your application in Windows XP compatibility mode, it should work (it depends on how the Java Sound API interacts with the hardware volume).
If you want to use the Vista (and beyond) sound APIs, you want to look at the IAudioEndpointVolume API.
My guess is since you're using an USB device, your Java sound API does not access the correct channel.
You can have a look at how to adjust the master volume in Windows XP. I know you aren't working in XP but have a look at how to access specific Lines and Mixers on that link. You may have to experiment a bit to find the correct line and mixer combination, or offer your users a GUI that allows them to choose the correct line and mixer combination.
I've run applications that work with this method in Windows 7 so I doubt that it's an O compatibility issue.
SWT is designed to be cross-platform, so it can run on a Mac. The problem is it commits the cardinal sin of Macland - it's UGLY. Toolbars don't look like Mac toolbars, status bars don't look like Mac status bars, etc.
Does anyone have any experience in making an SWT application look more like a Mac application? For example, by making platform-specific JNI calls via the 'OS' class in SWT? If so, how difficult was it?
(This question arises because we are looking at porting an existing SWT app designed to run on Windows)
Thanks
This is usually problem of Swing not SWT (SWT is directly linked to OS/framework provided widgets) - a quote from A gentle introduction to SWT and JFace 2:
SWT is a library that creates a Java
view of the native host operating
system GUI controls. It is host
implementation-dependent. This means
SWT-based applications have several
key characteristics:
1. They look, act, and perform like "native" applications.
2. The widgets provided reflect the widgets (the components and controls) provided on the host operating system.
3. Any special behavior
of the host GUI libraries is reflected
in SWT GUIs.
The pre 3.5 Milestone used to use Carbon framework and now the 3.5+ supports both 32/64bit Cocoa framework 1 so perhaps that has caused you confusion? Or can you be more specific, give us the version you use and some screenshots / sample code to reproduce?
I have been developing java application based on SWT/Eclipse RCP for a while on OSX and have not found and major problem with look&feel (of cause it does not 100% comply the Apple HID 3 as it complies with Eclipse UIG)
The best I can offer is to use either MacWidgets or Quaqua which are both free and in different stages of maturity. The bad news would be that they are both Swing based which is probably not what you want to hear.
You can make your application look and behave like mac application easily. Apple supplies a application called JarBundler with it you can put your menu items up where they belong it will also build a double click able executable, and you can set a icon.
Swing components on Mac OS X looks a lot like their cocoa components, and for OS X you can set some special flags that will make them just like their cocoa counter parts, such as you can set a flag for a JTextField and make it look like cocoa search field.
Also all Macs come with java pre-installed so thats one less worry.
I created support for the Mac OS native toolbar first for Carbon then for the Cocoa version of SWT. At the time I managed to transfer the eclipse perspective switcher to a native toolbar. I had no Obj-C experience so the Cocoa version was more work than the Carbon version, but when all is told, it is not really hard. After supporting the toolbar, I wrote some code to support Alpha Compositing, native image transparency, hardware accelerated effects (CAAnimation). For these, the more difficult part was to understand why some APIs were not even available to be generated by the Eclipse JNI generator. Turned out that the python bridge generator that provided by apple had not been upgraded for the Obj-C 2.0 Property syntax. When I fixed that, I was able to have the SWT JNI Generator spit out the missing APIs. From there, using them was the easy part. You can find some partial pieces of this in the eclipse.org bugzilla server.
I can't say it is always simple, but if you already know Obj-C, then you should be able to do anything you want. A couple days ago I started working on SWT Cocoa again, to add support for ARGB images (as opposed to the limited transparency support offered by ImageData).
Good luck.
I often use the odd "platform queries" to tweak an app. For example, its not really about dressing up an app and more about (for example) making the exit menu option say "Quit" on Mac and "Exit on windows. There are some Mac style guidelines that I can't get round like this but it may help.
See Patform.java for the switching class and ExitAction.java for an example of its use.
Good luck with it :D