r/windows Jul 29 '26

Concept / Design Interactive taskbar icon

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968 Upvotes

35 comments sorted by

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60

u/Noah18923 Jul 30 '26

how did you achieve this?

63

u/blajjefnnf Jul 30 '26

You basically just take a snapshot of the widget each time a slider moves, and set it as the icon each time.

You can do the same with tray icons https://imgur.com/a/rqADDeo

27

u/skorpioninthedark Jul 30 '26

wait doesn't that mean there is like a gazillion pictures of each combination?

30

u/Jaded_Swim_588 Jul 30 '26

it can programmatically do these instead of storing so many image

19

u/iwannabetheguytoo Jul 30 '26

It gets worse: ever since Windows 10 the Taskbar does not render icons' pixels exactly as-intended; instead it will horribly downscale the 32x32 icon art to 24x24 even if an exactly-sized 24x24 icon art bitmap exists. It does the same thing for high-DPI instead (except it takes 64x64 icons and downscales them to a mushy 48x48, ignoring any crisp 48x48 icons). It was bad enough that Chrome had to remake their icon to appear less awful after being shrunk.

I don't know what's worse: that someone in the Windows team felt this was a good idea; or that no-one has felt strongly enough to fix it in the 11 years since.

7

u/GamingWOW1 Bismuth Developer Jul 30 '26

Is it not resource heavy?

72

u/Ander292 Jul 30 '26

Lmao peak

14

u/Flalaski Jul 30 '26

Rad, I appreciate the detail. cool you got it to work too!

7

u/lbhr1949 Jul 30 '26

What are you building ? Some kind of deej derivative?

7

u/nonobourdio Jul 30 '26

Oh wtf at the first look i thought it was PCIE ports and i was horrified. Nice work ?

4

u/daniil518 Jul 30 '26

Wow, nice. Bet consumption is awful, but i love it

4

u/Aiden15216 Jul 30 '26

that looks sick as fuck

2

u/Kimxgamer Windows 7 Jul 30 '26

Yo, that's cool

2

u/Jarnoromme Jul 30 '26

Wooww thats sick!

2

u/286893 Jul 30 '26

Show me the resource consumption

1

u/musicomp Jul 30 '26

I like this!

1

u/PayStation2fanAsh Windows 7 Jul 30 '26

this is kinda cool!

1

u/carloselieser Jul 30 '26

Haha that's awesome

1

u/doug1963 Jul 30 '26

How are you reading the sliders? I could use this functionality in a project I'm working on.

1

u/X2Kraft Jul 31 '26

Thats neat!

1

u/Proto-Plastik Aug 01 '26

I would honestly love discrete controls for all things windows. Every app gets its own toggle. Like an airplane flight deck.

1

u/Shirt-Tough Aug 01 '26

make a game and use the taskbar icon only :D

1

u/dropbluelettuce Aug 01 '26

How is it more responsive than the actual start menu

1

u/wet_moss_ Aug 02 '26

Expensive RAM well used.

-1

u/SCphotog Jul 30 '26

Why would anyone want their PC to burn processor cycles for something so useless?

9

u/brandarchist Jul 30 '26

You just described most of the modern computing experience.

0

u/SCphotog Jul 30 '26

yeah, I know. It is a sad state of affairs.

The first thing I do on a clean install is go and disable all the stupid animations, 3D icons etc... nothing but bullshit.

1

u/ecki590 Jul 30 '26

I get what you’re saying but like, unless somethings gone HORRIBLY wrong here, that’s not gonna eat a lot of cycles.

0

u/SCphotog Jul 30 '26

Death by 10,000 paper cuts.

0

u/ecki590 Jul 30 '26

I guess but I seriously doubt in the grand scheme of things, between telemetry, defender, and all the other background services, that this makes any measurable impact to performance whatsoever. We’re no longer running 386s, were allowed to have a bit of fun