Perl ScreenSaver

[beretboy]

I'm working on some distributed computing projects and it would be very convienent to run the clients in the form of a screensaver (like SETI@Home). I found this node, which was helpful but I still need to figure out how to make the program exit upon mouse or keyboard activity. The target platform in this case is Windows. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

"Sanity is the playground of the unimaginative" -Unknown

[tall_man]

perl/Tk applications will work on Windows, and you can easily bind mouse and keyboard activity to exit the program.

use strict;
use Tk;
my $mw = new MainWindow();
...
$mw->bind("<Motion>",sub { $mw->destroy });
MainLoop;

[beretboy]

Thanks thats perfect!

"Sanity is the playground of the unimaginative" -Unknown

[Anonymous Monk]

post code or email to [e-mail]

[phydeauxarff]

Interesting question....not a windows programmer myself but I believe what you are needing to do is catch the interupt event from the mouse, or better yet from mouse and/or keyboard.
did some CPAN searching to see if there was already a module that could do this and SDL::Event seems to have some promise and appears to be quite flexible in the type of events you can capture.
Though I don't know that I would approach this in Perl (crouches as the monks gasp at his heresy)...it does sound like an facinating exercise to try

[paulbort]

I'm just learning Perl::Tk, but I'm guessing that you will need to do something like trap all keyboard and mouse events on the main window, and minimize on any event. You should probably also watch for the main window losing focus, which could indicate a system keystroke like SAS (Secure Attention Sequence) or the "Windows" key. If you can bear to read VB, Microsoft has an example of the API calls.
--
Spring: Forces, Coiled Again!

[guha]

When I read Perl && mouse && keyboard events I seem to recall having seen a module named Win32::Console with those specs. It is distributed with Activestate's Perl v633.

No I have not tried it myself, but it seems to be well documented so why don't you check it out.

[Ionizor]

An alternative approach that might serve you just as well is to make your program run all the time but set the priority to "Idle". This way it stays running in the background whenever there are spare CPU cycles meaning you never have to exit. I've seen some benchmarks done on Folding@Home which uses this approach and the impact of the client on system performance is negligable.

I'm guessing this throws all hope of cross platform compatability out the (heh) window but it didn't seem to be an important consideration...

--
Grant me the wisdom to shut my mouth when I don't know what I'm talking about.