That jpeg image viewing with fP...

[Chad McWilliams]

> The other considerations aren't as hard.  Some sort of IPC 
> can always be worked out.  I personally think it would 
> probably be easiest to make it a client/server affair where 
> the viewer simply listens for a UDP packet from the local 
> host (ONLY from the local host, for security reasons) that 
> tells it the pathname of the image to load.  You'd call a 
> windowless client that would start the viewer if it needed 
> starting, and pass along the data to the viewer once one is 
> running--or the current one if extant.  It's a pity Windows 
> doesn't support named pipes.  That would be ideal.
> 
> This model (rather than DDE, OLE/COM, etc.) would actually 
> make -that- part of it uniform between *nix and Windows, and 
> only the focus would have to be reworked for *nix if it was 
> ever required.
> 
> Of course, if Vueprint is sufficient, I shouldn't bother 
> wasting my time.  :) Hence the query...
> 
> mark->


I agree with Mark here.  I did something similar to this a few years back.
We wanted to have filePro (running on Unix) generate a pdf file that would
popup on the users desktop.  I wrote a small perl program that runs in the
background on the Win machine and listens on a specified port for a
connection.  Then the unix box also had a perl program to initiate that
connection and send the data.  This could be used in the same way for this
task.  It would accomplish being able to have a single window open, while
changing what is displayed in the window.  I'm not sure if filepro would
loose focus or not when this happened since a windows command isn't
executing to display the image (i.e. start).

-Chad McWilliams