The Steampunk Mercury Desktop Widget, written in VB6 for Windows and ReactOS. Created for XP, Vista, Win7, 8, 10/11+, ReactOS as well as Linux or the Apple Mac's OS/X with Wine. This Mercury Desktop Widget is an attractive and steamy VB6 widget for your desktop. This VB6 widget provides a simple moveable marble globe complete with rings
The others are the Uranus, Jupiter, Saturn and of course, 'God of War', the planet Mars. Double-clicking on the planet will cause a personalised Windows application to fire up. The first time you run it there will be no assigned function and so it will state as such - then it will pop up the preferences so that you can enter the command of your choice. The widget takes command line-style commands for windows.
This is a simple RC/VB6 widget based upon one of my old Yahoo widgets, little more than a glorified desktop icon really. Just an image of a planetary body that responds to a double-click to open an application you choose to assign. A bit of background: The Yahoo widget SDK came with a Photoshop conversion script that could take any image and create a desktop widget within 30 seconds. This meant that you could create eye-candy desktop widgets with ease in just a few clicks. This planetary red widget is a VB6 version of one of those, demonstrating the principle of creating such a desktop widget using VB6.
Why VB6? Well, with a 64 bit, modern-language improvement upgrade on the way in the guise of 100% compatible TwinBasic, coupled with support for transparent PNGs via Olaf Schmidt's RC/Cairo wrapper, VB6 code has an amazing future.
The Mercury widget is an attractive dieselpunk VB6 widget for your desktop. Functional and gorgeous at the same time. The graphics are my own. It is all my code with some help from the chaps at VBForums (credits given). This Widget is a moveable widget that you can move anywhere around the desktop as you require.
This widget can be increased in size, animation speed can be changed, opacity/transparency may be set as to the users discretion. The widget can also be made to hide for a pre-determined period.
Right clicking will bring up a menu of options. Double-clicking on the widget will cause a personalised Windows application to fire up. The first time you run it there will be no assigned function and so it will state as such and then pop up the preferences so that you can enter the command of your choice. The widget takes command line-style commands for windows. Mouse hover over the widget and press CTRL+mousewheel up/down to resize. It works well on Windows XP to Windows 11.
The Mercury VB6 widget is Beta-grade software, under development, not yet ready to use on a production system - use at your own risk.
This version was developed on Windows 7 using 32 bit VisualBasic 6 as a FOSS project creating a WoW64 widget for the desktop.
It is open source to allow easy configuration, bug-fixing, enhancement and community contribution towards free-and-useful VB6 utilities that can be created by anyone. The first step was the creation of this template program to form the basis for the conversion of other desktop utilities or widgets. A future step is new VB6 widgets with more functionality and then hopefully, conversion of each to RADBasic/TwinBasic for future-proofing and 64bit-ness.
This utility is one of a set of steampunk and dieselpunk widgets. That you can find here on Deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/yereverluvinuncleber/gallery
I do hope you enjoy using this utility and others. Your own software enhancements and contributions will be gratefully received if you choose to contribute.
INSTALLATION :
If you are just a casual user of desktop programs then simply download the SETUP.EXE and run it. If you are a developer and you want to make changes to the code then read on.
BUILD: The program runs without any Microsoft plugins.
Built using: VB6, MZ-TOOLS 3.0, VBAdvance, CodeHelp Core IDE Extender Framework 2.2 & Rubberduck 2.4.1, RichClient 6
Links:
https://www.vbrichclient.com/#/en/About/
MZ-TOOLS https://www.mztools.com/
CodeHelp https://www.planetsourcecode.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=62468&lngWId=1
Rubberduck https://rubberduckvba.com/
Rocketdock https://punklabs.com/
Registry code ALLAPI.COM
La Volpe https://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=67466&lngWId=1
PrivateExtractIcons code https://www.activevb.de/rubriken/
Persistent debug code https://www.vbforums.com/member.php?234143-Elroy
Open File common dialog code without dependent OCX - https://forums.codeguru.com/member.php?92278-rxbagain
VBAdvance
Tested on :
ReactOS 0.4.14 32bit on virtualBox
Windows 7 Professional 32bit on Intel
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on Intel
Windows 7 Professional 64bit on Intel
Windows XP SP3 32bit on Intel
Windows 10 Home 64bit on Intel
Windows 10 Home 64bit on AMD
Windows 11 64bit on Intel
CREDITS:
I have really tried to maintain the credits as the project has progressed. If I have made a mistake and left someone out then do forgive me. I will make amends if anyone points out my mistake in leaving someone out.
MicroSoft in the 90s - MS built good, lean and useful tools in the late 90s and early 2000s. Thanks for VB6.
Olaf Schmidt - This tool was built using the RichClient RC5 Cairo wrapper for VB6. Specifically the components using transparency and reading images directly from PSD. Thanks for the massive effort Olaf in creating Cairo counterparts for all VB6 native controls and giving us access to ad