opening any software app in another app

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opening any software app in another app

chsmith
Dear Corquet Developers,

I am trying to teach students how to use the wonderful tools of technology with
a better tool than a book.  I have made a small but successful attempt and now
I need to create a better tool.  The following is what I am looking for help
with.

> Dear Squeakers,
> >
> > I have always had a hard time learning anything until I had a project to
> > do it around.  Well that time has come.
> >
> > I need to write an app. that will let me run one application inside
> > another.  I would like to have a cad type app. running in a window and
> > then be able to over lay that cad app. with another app.  that lets me
> > put hot spots on the cad app.
[SNIP]

As far as I can tell you want to run a regular app (on win32?) and then
let Squeak "draw" on top of it to visually outline specific areas etc.
  :YES this is what I want to do.:
- Can the Squeak helper app presume that the CAD app is looking the same
and being positioned on the desktop in such a manner that the positions do
not change?

:We need to figure this one out:

Otherwise you need to do "visual analysis" and that's hard.

- Squeak normally only draws inside its own window but there are FFI
(foreign function interface) examples of using Win32 GDI (or other
platform specific graphical calls) to draw outside the window "directly on
the desktop". This might be sufficient for your needs.

- I have a faint recollection that wxSqueak (now seemingly stalled) could
do stuff outside the window, but I may be wrong.

- Another approach is to "bring the app into Squeak" using VNC or X11 or
such, I guess the Croqueteers knows more about this since they do it in
Croquet. Possibly your best bet is to write this in Croquet, it would also
give you lots of other cool "educational" stuff.

regards, Göran

Thanks for any help you can offer,

Chuck Smith