Keep On Top

It’s been over 2 months since my last post, but I’m still kickin’.
The last 2 months has seen a lot activity – the holidays, a new job, some winter travel, a lot of football and a bit of geek stuff.

So for my first post of 2011, I decided to share some open source code I wrote. Here’s the problem space:

You’re doing something that requires attention, but not interaction. For me, this may involve watching a process run or tailing a log file. Or maybe it’s installing some new software. Whatever.
But I hate just sitting there watching the stuff. Who wants to sit and watch log files tail for 2 hours straight? All I really want to know is when it’s done or I want to see if it stops or gets any obvious errors. So I open up my email and fire off a couple. I pop open a browser. I get ping-ed on a chat client by a friend. And, maybe I play a computer game or something.
While I do this, the window I’m watching gets lost under the rest of them. So I … do what? I can randomly switch to the “watch window” and hope to catch it at the right time to see the error, I suppose. But what I really want is for that window to stay in sight while I’m doing something else.

So I wrote KeepOnTop. KeepOnTop starts up with a list of all your running applications. You pick one and it locks that window at the top of all the others. It does not give the window focus. And, in fact, the window stays on top even when you’re typing somewhere else.

The assumption is that you resize the window to be reasonably small and move it off to the side, Then you can type away at an email or whatever, while watching the log file tail. The only impact to the email app is that the part directly under the top window won’t be visible. Of course, you can move the top window anywhere you like anytime you want, so you can get by that.

KeepOnTop uses some native Windows APIs by importing user32.dll into C# as an “extern” and then exposing 3 or 4 static functions in it.

It’s not quite finished yet. I’m thinking about doing a bit of Windows explorer integration so you can right-click an executable and say “keepOnTop”, which would cause the exe to be run and automagically pushed to the top. But we’ll see.

Meanwhile, you can find it on SourceForge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/keepontop/

The source is in the subversion area. The exe is in a zip file under the “files” area.