Pop-up Notification Window for Classic Skins

[Aminifu]

I like small pop-up notification windows that display info related to the item currently playing in WACUP. They are also useful when WACUP is minimized or behind other apps on my desktop. After much testing, I have found one that works very well with the modern skins I use. It displays the item's albumart along with other related info (artist, title, album, etc.). It is easy and simple to configure.

I'm now looking for something similar to use with classic skins. I've been experimenting with the old toaster plug-in developed for Winamp. It's configuration dialog is not very intuitive and sometimes settings are not retained between sessions. Can anyone reading this post suggest something else I could possible use?

[Aminifu]

The old toaster plug-in also interferes with the correct skinning of classic skins when switching to another classic skin than the one I started a session with. The original developer of this plug-in stopped providing updates several years ago. So any suggestions for a replacement would be greatly appreciated.

[dro]

I'm not aware of there being an alternative & making a replacement toaster plug-in has been on my todo list for quite some time now & I'm still undecided on what I'm actually going to use to implement it when I do.

As it could be done via the OS toast notification support though that'd then limit things to win10+ setups (iirc it can work also on win8.x but it'd be simpler to limit it to being implemented as part of the win10shell plug-in & the OS requirements for that plug-in to be installed).

That does afaict allow for artwork to be shown & there'd be customisation of what text is set to be used but it's not going to match the skin aesthetic (not that I think the toaster plug-in really did) & I'd been debating using the mechanism as a means to report new build updates for long running instances from some old feedback I'd gotten. https://github.com/mohabouje/WinToast?tab=readme-ov-file#toast-templates has some examples of what can be done so if I was to use this approach I'd likely be looking at a config option for artwork or not & then an ATF string to be used to configure what's shown (whether that's a single line allowed to wrap or specific values for each line per what the toaster api seems to allow to be set).

Otherwise it'd need to be done more like the old toaster plug-in with it making its own window & faffing around with things that way which'd allow for older OS support (I know I shouldn't focus on such things but it also has an impact for those using WINE) but probably means more time to work on developing it.

-dro

[Aminifu]

Ok, I'll wait for you to come up with something. I also don't like that I can't make the old toaster plug-in only work with classic skins. When using modern skins, I get 2 notifier pop-ups. 1 provided by the skin and 1 by the plug-in.

[dro]

There'll be something in the next build using the OS provided toast support with the prefs options for it on the "Windows 10 | 11" prefs page. How well it'll fit is uncertain as the control of it is limited in the initial attempt (i.e. a single atf for what's shown in the main body of it) & unlike the modern skin implementation it can't live update information if it's already being shown.

As for the old toaster plug-in, whether it's the original or the patched version, most of the time it never seemed to show a toast window so I don't know if that's something with the OS dpi settings or something else.

-dro