Screen-saver in Dolphin?

Has anybody done a screen-saver in Dolphin?

Looking at D4, I see there is a class called
DolphinSplash, which could be a starting point
for a screen-saver.  Its  window  has no title-bar
for instance?

But is DolphinSplash  the best way to go?
Might there be a generic class called ScreenSaver
already?

Similarly it would be interesting if there was some
support or examples - or a framework - for writing
shell-extensions in Dolphin.

Thanks
-Panu Viljamaa

panu wrote:

> Has anybody done a screen-saver in Dolphin?

There's a technical article in my version of MSDN (that came with VC++ 6) that
discusses how to do this -- a screen saver is basically just a .exe (with a
different filename) that understands a few command-line flags.  I see no
obvious reason why Dolphin's deployed exes couldn't work fine in that way.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't seem to be in the on-line version of MSDN,
although a closely related article (about doing it from VB) *is* available.
See
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/en-us/dnarvb4/html/msdn_ss101.asp

If you have access to another version of MSDN then you may be able to find the
orginal article.  Its title is:

    Creating 32-Bit Screen Savers with Visual C++ and MFC
    Nigel Thompson
    December 4, 1994

Both articles are rather old, so it maybe that the architecture has changed
since...

    -- chris

Chris Uppal wrote:

> ...I see no obvious reason why Dolphin's deployed exes couldn't work
> fine in that way.

Thanks for the link, Chris.

 From the little research I've done it seems to me one issue that adds
complexity is the required (?) command-line flags. For instance there is
the 'preview' window in Windows, that's supposed to show a small preview
of the screen-saver in action.

What started me thinking in this direction was IBM's Sash -environment
(among other things)  which basically is a JavaScript environment that
has built-in support for creating different types of applications on
Windows, including screen-savers and shell-extensions. JavaScript is
pretty close to Smalltalk, or even Self,  in many ways.

This is one avenue in which Dolphin might find a profitable niche -
allowing users to easily extend their Windows environment, with the help
of  objects, frameworks, and wizards. Dolphin already has the OLE
wizard, and  I think that is the right way to go. Use the power of pure
objects to control your Windows environment.

-Panu Viljamaa