QTaskbarControl

A class to create a taskbar/launcher progress and more, for all desktop platforms

Features

• Show a progress in the taskbar/launcher/dock/…
• Show a badge with a number in the taskbar/launcher/dock/…
• Works on:
  • Windows >= 7
  • macOS
  • Linux (Desktops that support the com.canonical.Unity.LauncherEntry D-Bus signal, for example Unity, KDE)
• Additional Windows Features:
  • Set the badge icon background and text color
  • Set the progress state (running, paused, stopped)
  • Show indeterminate progress

Installation

The package is providet as qpm package, de.skycoder42.qtaskbarcontrol. To install:

1. Install qpm (See GitHub - Installing, for windows see below)
2. In your projects root directory, run qpm install de.skycoder42.qtaskbarcontrol
3. Include qpm to your project by adding include(vendor/vendor.pri) to your .pro file

Check their GitHub - Usage for App Developers to learn more about qpm.

Important for Windows users: QPM Version 0.10.0 (the one you can download on the website) is currently broken on windows! It's already fixed in master, but not released yet. Until a newer versions gets released, you can download the latest dev build from here:

• https://storage.googleapis.com/www.qpm.io/download/latest/windows_amd64/qpm.exe
• https://storage.googleapis.com/www.qpm.io/download/latest/windows_386/qpm.exe

Usage

For most platforms, you simply need to create an instance of the class for a window, and your good to go. For linux however, you need to do additional setup. Read Special setup for linux. The following example shows the part thats the same for all platforms:

auto widget = new QWidget(); //your window
auto taskbar = new QTaskbarControl(widget); //MUST have a valid parent!

// additional linux setup here

taskbar->setProgress(0.42);
taskbar->setProgressVisible(true);
taskbar->setCounter(42);
taskbar->setCounterVisible(true);

Special setup for linux

In order to work, the linux implementation needs an application with a valid desktop file in an accessible location (e.g. ~/.local/share/applications/ on KDE). You need to set that file as extra property to enable it. The following steps explain how to properly setup QTaskbarProgress with a desktop file:

1. Create a .desktop file. For testing purpose, the following should suffice:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.1
Name=<MyApp>
Exec=<path_to_MyApp>

2. Copy that file to a location where desktop files are found by the OS (e.g. ~/.local/share/applications, /usr/local/share/applications, /usr/share/applications)
3. Register the desktop file in your application. In case the file is named myapp.desktop, add the following code after the construction of QTaskbarControl:

taskbar->setAttribute(QTaskbarControl::LinuxDesktopFile, "myapp.desktop");

And thats it. When you run the application it should work. I case it doesn't work: Try to set a different icon for the desktop file, e.g. gtk-edit. If you see that icon in the taskbar, your application gets corretly "connected" to that desktop file.

Icon Reference

• Windows: https://www.iconfinder.com/icons/10282/circle_red_icon#size=48