Add an application title, and an image, to Win8's startup splash screen - windows-8

I work at one of those benighted companies that don't realize the benefits of living entirely within the MS world. (My bosses are so deluded by social media group-think they actual make us use PyQt4, but that's neither here nor there...;)
So, in terms of saving me a lot of bookyuck, how does an app that is NOT generated by Visual Studio put all of ...
a rotating picture
a string of text
... into MS's vaunted Win8 start splash screen?
I think it has something to do with writing a package.appxmanifest, and putting some splashscreen.jpg goodness inside that. Then I send the manifest to the splash screen by ... what? Registering it? Installing it with the right-click context menu?
What's the shortest path to this simple task?

See Desktop App tiles on the Start Screen, but it's not what you were hoping for.
Obly Tile looks interesting, but I suspect that's something they do ex post facto to put a shell around a desktop app that's already installed, but perhaps that's sufficient for your needs?

Related

What is the best way to display and interact with a skill tree

I am trying to create an interface that is similar to the interface on this website for the skill tree: http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree. What is the best way to go about doing this and have the same or similar user interaction. ie. you click on a node and it activate or deactivates it. The movement of the tree and zooming on it would be nice as well. Would like to try to stay away from webView as I am thinking about features I want to add. Thanks in advance just want to see what a good way to do this is.
you can use webView and have almost a copy-paste of the presented webpage html source and load it.
However with native components you can have better performance, but it will "not a copy"
Native componets:
IIViewDeckController for iOS
iHasApp for iOS
iHasApp for iOS
There are more on that side. Consider a combination of they,

block ipad camera

Is there any way in which the usage of the camera of the iPad2 can be restricted only to my application? even if it is using i tunes.
could not find any code related to it. some code would be helpful.
There's no way to achieve this. I think it could be done with quite a bunch of hacking if you were developing for Cydia, but I'm not sure ever then. If the user quits your application or switches from it, the system will make the camera available to any other app requesting it.

Make another app's windows borderless

Is there any way to remove the window border (i.e., make the style NSBorderlessWindowMask) for a window that belongs to another application?
Those windows don't belong to your application. Your only hope is hackery.
Look into something like SIMBL to inject code into the other applications. There's also ApplicationEnhancer.
Good luck - screw-ups here can destablize others' apps or the entire system. Also, I highly doubt Apple will let you play in their App Store if your app does this.

Two native AIR windows from a single AIR app?

I'm building in FlashDevlop as pure AS3.
I'm looking at building a kiosk that uses two screens. Its used to administer tests. So one screen has the test, second the controls for admin the test. I have played with wide app but its not very elegant and I really would like both screens to run full screen on each screen. Is it possible to have one air app spawn two native air windows? A secondary question is it possible to detect multiple screens and target a screen to full screen to? Even something as simple as checking the window size to detect would work, im just not sure I can move and if the low level api will fullscreen on that screen. I could not find any examples of this in the docs.
What docs did you look into? I found it right away.
You'll need the Screen class if you want information on the screens that are connected to the PC. And here's some documentation on using it.
To create new windows, just instantiate a new NativeWindow class and call activate() on it when you're done configuring.
There's a lot of other useful stuff for you in the flash.display package. All the AIR stuff is marked with a little AIR icon. I have to admit that it would have been easier to find if they had put these classes in a separate AIR package.

Very confused by a binding issue between a Cocoa app and a Movie Loader patch in Quartz Composer

I've been programming for a while, but just recently decided to start developing for Mac OS X. I feel like I've come to grips with the basics of Objective-C and Cocoa development over the past week. I'm planning on making graphics apps, and as such am currently in the process of learning how to control Quartz compositions through a Cocoa app. I went through the tutorial that apple offers (with the Mac Engravings composition), and was able to create that just fine. In order to make sure that I truly understood what I learned, I decided to create my own composition and link it to a slightly more complicated Cocoa application.
Essentially, I have a composition that loads a movie or image through a Movie Loader patch, at which point it applies various filters to the frames before outputting it. In my Cocoa app, I've written code (or rather copied and pasted from other apple examples) that lets a user pick a file using an NSOpenPanel object. The filepath of the file they pick gets placed in a text-box that I placed in the app's window using Interface Builder. I binded the value of said text-box to the "Movie_Location" key in my composition, which is a published input in the Movie Loader patch that I'm using. However, no matter what I do, movies and images aren't loaded into this composition no matter what I try. The only thing that gets displayed is the default image that I have saved in that input from Quartz Composer (or nothing if I leave it blank before publishing).
I've added a Clear Color patch to the composition and binded that to a colorwell in my UI, and that successfully changes the color in my display, so I know that the composition and my Cocoa app are communicating. I've spent numerous hours at this point trying to figure out what's going on, and I've just about given up. Does the Movie Loader have any weird behaviors that I'm not aware of, or is there something obvious that I seem to be missing? I'd really appreciate any help or advice from anybody.
Thanks for reading through this...
Best,
Sami
There are two things I can think of as reasons why it is doing this:
The file path isn't formatted incorrectly. Try checking backslashes, colons, etc.
The box isn't updating the value. Try literally clicking in the text field and hitting enter.
That's all I can think of without seeing your quartz composition and/or code.
EDIT:
Check the other continuous box, in the general properties.
I figured this out yesterday. spudwaffle's second idea is what was going on. If I were to type a filepath in and hit enter, it would work just fine. I got this to work properly by just removing the bind and instead using the setValue:keyInPath: function that a patch controller offers. That said, is there some way to force a text-box to update? I remember seeing a "continuously update" or something like that button within the bind sub-menu in the inspector, but my code didn't work with that checked either.
Thanks to those of you that tried to help me! I really appreciate it.
Best,
Sami