| Apollia's Floating Volume Control v1.0 |
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Thursday, May 5th, 2016 19:49:46 GMT |
| Software AutoHotkey |
To my surprise, I recently ended up making this:
It's an AutoHotkey script, so, it's for Windows. It works for me in Windows 7 with AutoHotkey v1.1.23.05 (Unicode 64-bit). I haven't tested it with other versions of Windows and AutoHotkey, but hopefully it will work.
It's a slider which controls the volume of your computer's audio. The slider can be either horizontal or vertical. It can either constantly float in the foreground above all other windows, or it can easily be summoned by single-clicking the taskbar icon.
By default, the slider is unusually large because my Toughbook CF-C1 has a touchscreen, so I wanted the slider to be difficult to miss with my fingers. Also, to avoid accidental repositioning, you can configure the window to be impossible to drag around the screen.
The window can be configured to have whatever amount of transparency you want. Double-clicking the taskbar icon mutes or unmutes.
One flaw is that currently, the only way to permanently save your settings is to edit the source code.
But, since this software is free (as in freedom and as in price), libre, and open source, hopefully everything about this software can be changed or fixed however you like.
But also, releasing free (as in freedom), libre, open source software on non-libre platforms like Windows and Macs helps give those platforms' oppressed users a taste of freedom - which could result in a nice, healthy craving for even more freedom.
I also tried PKVolume (which is what I always used to use in Windows XP), but I couldn't get that to work either.
That's largely thanks to a lot of very helpful AutoHotkey Forum posts, example scripts, and script snippets by many authors, and the excellent AutoHotkey documentation.
Also, AutoHotkey is overall really nice, easy, fun to work with, and actually one of my favorite things in Windows.
And I was able to ease the boring chore of making the About window by modifying some code from DimScreen.ahk by Skrommel. DimScreen and tons of other great AHK scripts are available from DonationCoder.com.
Thanks to everyone above, or connected with the above!
Why am I still using Windows at all? Because it's hard to get away from for some things, like listening to legally free (as in price) audiobooks from my local library website, Clevnet.
And why did I make this particular thing? Because I've finally been trying to put my Toughbook CF-C1 with an annoying widescreen (or less annoying tallscreen, if you turn it sideways and use it in tablet mode) to more use... and when I tried a few existing AHK volume slider scripts, none of them worked for me in Windows 7.
Fortunately, the Floating Volume Control took less than 4 days to put together. (The creation timestamp on the original script file is May 1, 2016, 3:54:22 PM EDT.)
Also, thanks to Saki, the artist who made the GPL-licensed icons I used as the Floating Volume Control's taskbar icons.
And thanks to IconArchive.com, which makes it really easy to find nice icons.