WinT - 28 Jan. 2003 - 13:58:

Look at what WinT did to his Open/Save box!

Hey guys. Check this screenshot out (remember to copy and paste this link)

http://snow.prohosting.com/~paul1977/openbox.jpg

I finally figured out how to remove those buttons that I never used, and that allowed me to move things around quite a bit. Used ResHacker to achieve this, and came up with a couple of interesting things:

I haven't tried it yet, but I'm thinking that the run box can actually be turned into an open dialog box. Or should I say, you could make the run box work the same as an open box by simply applying the same functions found on the open box, to the run box. Might be helpfull for some, maybe not. I'm gonna try it just to see if it works anyway.

Second thing I'm focusing on is extending the functionality of the Open box itself. I'm currently trying to add the "SysTreeView32" function to the open box. This would give us the ultimate ease in browseing for files when using the open box. Essentialy, if it worked, it should produce the same style of pull down, or "DropDownList" that already exist at the TOP of the open box, but, instead of giving you a list of your drives, and the desktop, and my computer folders, this list would pull down, and provide you with your whole directory tree right there in one place.

As you can see though, this is a really flexible hack. The buttons are on the box itself, but you can't see them inside of ResHacker. I just happened to click on where they should be, and turns out the foundation of the buttons is a "Static" control. So, obviously, I deleted that control, therefore resulting in the deletion of the buttons themselves. I never used those buttons at all, and the only one I was interested in was the "Details" view button for the icons, but, my icon view hack applies to the open box icon views as well, so I can have all four icon views within the open box.

Now, one thing I was thinking about is, if the open/save box buttons are actually one "Static" control, you can apply BITMAPS and ICONS to static items. So I'm wondering if this would work around the color pallete problem that results from trying to increase the color pallete on the bitmaps for the buttons.

You'de of course, have to open up Comctl32.dll and delete the default bitmap strips to do this, but you never know. I didn't try it before I deleted the buttons, and I hate to default back to the original.

So, maybe I can get the tree view thing working.

Bittemei, if you read this (and I hope you do), the tree view might could really help you since you were trying to improve or add on to the list that you can already pull down in your open boxes. You'de never have to add special folders to My Computer ever again if you had the tree view going.