Suggestions for creating a sort of a widgit thingy - sort of half midimised

[FunkyDexter]

I have a winforms app and the customer is asking for it to be able to run in 4 modes. The standard 3 (minimised, maximised and midimised) should behave as normal. However, they also want a sort of "inconspicuous" mode where a small cut down form would run in bottom right of the screen with some bare details. Basically nothing but a progress bar/counter and an abort button. A bit like a persistent toaster notification.

I think I've really got two questions at this stage:-
1. Can anyone suggest a framework / approach that would support this sort of mini-window?
2. Can anyone suggest a good way to transition between it and the standard 3 modes (it would be great to add a 4th button to the top right of the main window but I wouldn't know where to start)?

[Peter Porter]

For #2, you might need custom size mode buttons at the top of your main form if you want a fourth. I have time on my hands to design them all for ya.

Transitioning, have the main form fade-out, and the progress form fade-in to something like 50% opacity or whatever.

If the program is always going to be running in the background, the close button can start the transition to the progress form. Just I don't know if winforms mode buttons can be overridden, so you might have to go with a borderless form with custom buttons.

[Peter Porter]

If you go with a borderless main form, here's a bare bones mode to transition to the bottom right progress form. That's if you don't have your own button icons. It's size is 24x24.



I'll recreate the other button modes so this new one doesn't look out of place.

[Peter Porter]

And here are all the modes:



Right click and open in new tab to save these pngs.

[Peter Porter]

If you prefer transparent to show the form's background color:



My feelings wont be hurt if you don't use them. They are kinda large.

I can redraw them 16x16. 12x12 is stick figure size, but doable.

[FunkyDexter]

Hey dude. Huge help, thank you very much.

They've put this requirement on hold but I'm pretty sure they're going to go ahead with it, just prioritising a few fixes first. So I reckon I'll be coming back to this in a couple of weeks or so.

The program is long running rather than always running so the close button should behave as normal but having an extra button would remove that need anyway.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

If you go with a borderless main form

That is exactly what I do on my small chat program, it 'minimises' to a borderless form containing a pertinent small image on the desktop, that can be dragged to anywhere on the desktop. Location saved and restored on a restart. When the application receives an update the image on the borderless form 'pulses' to alert the user to the fact. A single click on the borderless form activates the main window, borderless form fades out, main windows fades in.