[Vpn-help] windows client: tray icon functionality

[Thorsten Albrecht]

Matthew,

thanks for your long explanation.

> Would it help if the connection window only minimized instead of closing
> when the title bar button is pressed? I don't know if its possible, but
> I could try to find a way to build the window with a single title bar 
> button that minimizes the connection window instead of terminating the
> process.

This would be nice. Just as the option in Process Explorer "Hide when
minimized" which prevents the app from terminating it.

> Would it help if the connection window automatically minimized to a 
> system tray icon immediately after the connection succeeds?
Yes. And perhaps showing a tooltip "connected to..." ?


Thanks,

Thorsten


> Thorsten Albrecht wrote:
>> Hi,
>> is there any chance to extend the functionality of the tray icon
>> (to initiate a connection or to show a current connection)? The current
>> connection window is quite uncomfortable (e.g. closing the
>> window by accident just closes the current connection). It would be nice to
>> control everything via the system tray.
>> 
>> Thorsten
>> 

> Thorsten,

> Thanks for the suggestion. The problem is that the VPN Access Manager 
> and VPN Connect windows are currently two separate executables. The 
> system tray icon is a part of the VPN Access Manager which has nothing
> to do with communicating with the IKE daemon, which in turn, handles 
> communication with a distant peer. This was a conscience design decision
> made at when I began the VPN client development and was driven by a few
> important goals ...

> 1) Complete process separation
> 2) Only one Site Manager window open at any point in time
> 3) Multiple simultaneous VPN connections
> 4) Ability to launch lightweight VPN connections as a shortcut

> This also has some drawbacks. The Site Manager applications don't really
> know what the connection application instances are doing. They could be
> taught to communicate but this would require an IPC mechanism to be 
> built so the Access Manager could send control messages to connection 
> instances and status messages could be sent back the other direction. 
> Not a simple matter. What complicates this issue is that the GUI 
> applications on windows are based on a completely different code base 
> than the unix version of the client. IPC communications are very 
> different on both windows and unix so now we have a not so simple matter
> x2 to deal with. I do plan to move to using QT for all platforms in the
> future, including Mac OSX, but this is an even less trivial change to 
> make at present.

> So, I would like to make the GUI components more comfortable to use but
> am currently constrained to making only minor modifications to the user
> interface code. Here are some ideas ...

> Would it help if the connection window only minimized instead of closing
> when the title bar button is pressed? I don't know if its possible, but
> I could try to find a way to build the window with a single title bar 
> button that minimizes the connection window instead of terminating the
> process.

> Would it help if the connection window automatically minimized to a 
> system tray icon immediately after the connection succeeds? If so, this
> will definitely be an option in the next release. I just haven't got to
> that item on the todo list yet  

> http://www.shrew.net/vpn/todo.php

> Thanks,

> -Matthew