Dear fellow Monks,

For people who don't know about the pVoice project I work on, a short description:

Using wxPerl I create applications for severely disabled people like my own daughter Krista. So far I created pVoice (which gives people a synthetic voice by selecting symbols and letters to create sentences), pStory (listening to and viewing pages of books) and pType (to support writing by selecting letters only to create words or sentences).

 More information on http://www.pvoice.org

The idea now is to create a shell from which the user can fire up the software, and which keeps track of running applications, that may be minimized and restored. Think of it as a mini-windowmanager within Windows (yes, it's Win32 only).
The userinterface isn't the problem. I've created a bunch of modules to handle the userinterface for these kinds of applications.

My question to all of you is how I could implement the windowmanagement itself. The shell should fire up complete (standalone) applications. The applications themselves are able to minimize or close themselves, whereas the shell should be able to restore the applications that are minimized, not firing up a second copy of the same application, and also know when an application has been closed.

What wxPerl functions can I use for these management-tasks, or -in case wxPerl doesn't provide the functions I need- what other Perl modules can I use?
I could of course start struggling myself, but maybe you know an easy way of doing this.


Jouke Visser, Perl 'Adept'
Using Perl to help the disabled: pVoice and pStory

In reply to Ideas for implementing pShell by Jouke

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.