Taskbar Integration

[mottosso]

Goal

Reduce overhead from running applications from Allzpark.

Motivation

The Allzpark GUI is great for when you want total control over an application. But often times, you've already got everything configured just the way you want and you just want to launch an application. No launching of a launcher to right click on an app to then launch. Just launch. As though it was just another icon on your taskbar.

Implementation

"Pin" applications from within the Allzpark GUI that then appear in your start menu for a given profile. E.g. enter Alita and "pin" Maya and Blender. Now Maya and Blender appear in your taskbar amongst your other native applications that automatically launch an application within the Alita context.

[mottosso]

Taskbar icons should work cross platform, but may need to work differently on each platform.

1. They could either be a visual integration into the taskbar itself, like a little widget of sorts. Possibly akin to the volume and wireless icons on Windows, which aren't actual applications but widgets of sorts.
2. They could also be actual executables put onto the taskbar; this would be portable, but we'd lose control over these once created. For example, if the user switches profile, the icons would now refer to an older profile.

We could potentially help the user "clean up" these icons on switching profiles, and potentially have some mechanism that do that automatically. However being an actual executable doesn't make it clear that they are Allzpark executables; if the user has both Maya and a Maya from an Allzpark profile, there'd be now way of telling which to use. Like the illustration above, we could potentially highlight our icons, like draw a blue outline or the like to work around that. But preferably, we'd not only have the executables themselves but also a combo box with profiles to choose from but most importantly to see which profile you are in currently.