Active Desktop doesn't work in GeoShell, but...
We've created a couple of Hypertext Applications to substitute for it, at least in part. The idea of these scripts is to show you how simple the functionality really is ... so don't expect them to be earth-shatteringly complicated or feature-rich.
The first application is called PopOut
and it creates a window that automatically hides against the side of the screen when it looses focus. The cool thing about it is that if you set your desktop Left setting to one or two pixels, your maximized windows will not hide this, so you can pop it out on top of whatever you're working on when you want it.
The second application is called StayPut and it creates a window which, appropriately, stays put. I haven't so-far worked out how to make it draggable without ruining the effect of it's look, but if you hover over it, it will pop out a toolbar at the top which lets you close it, or 'hide' it in "window shade" mode.
Both of these apps show in alt-tab, but not the task bar, and are closeable (when thy have focus) by pressing Alt-F4. They also both work essentially the same way. They are simple HTML pages with some javascript, and the fancy HTML Application interface to allow them to be border-less. You can read all about HTML Applications in the MSDN
.
To use the script applications
Download the files by clicking on them above and choosing "save" to put them in your GeoShell\Utilities folder. Run these script by simply passing a URL to them. For instance: you could run:
to keep an eye on the recent topics of the geoshell board. And you could put a shortcut to that in your startup folder to have it load automatically.
Feel free to tweak the code of those scripts any way you like, to make them the size that you want, or to hard code the URL's or other content that you want to see.
