Using Windows 7 taskbar features in PyQt

Question

I am looking for information on the integration of some of the new Windows 7 taskbar features into my PyQt applications. Specifically if there already exists the possibility to use the new progress indicator (see here) and the quick links (www.petri.co.il/wp-content/uploads/new_win7_taskbar_features_8.gif). If anyone could provide a few links or just a "not implemented yet", I'd be very grateful. Thanks a lot.

Accepted Answer

As quark said, the functionality is not in Qt 4.5, but you can call the windows API directly from Qt. Its a little bit of work though.

The new taskbar API is exposed through COM, so you can't use ctypes.windll . You need to create a .tlb file to access the functions. Get the interface definition for ITaskbarList from this forum post , or from the windows SDK. Save it to a file called e.g. TaskbarLib.idl .

Create the .tlb file. You'll probably need the Windows SDK, or get an IDL compiler from somewhere else.

```
midl TaskbarLib.idl /tlb TaskbarLib.tlb
```

Load the .tlb (you need the Win32 Extensions for Python, http://python.net/crew/skippy/win32/Downloads.html):

```
import comtypes.client as cc
cc.GetModule("TaskbarLib.tlb")
```

Create the TaskbarList object. The function for setting the progress bar is in the interface ITaskbarList3:

```
import comtypes.gen.TaskbarLib as tbl
taskbar = cc.CreateObject(
    "{56FDF344-FD6D-11d0-958A-006097C9A090}",
    interface=tbl.ITaskbarList3)
```

Now you can call the API functions:

```
taskbar.HrInit()
taskbar.SetProgressValue(self.winId(),40,100)
```

Here's a complete example script. Sources: 1 2

Using Windows 7 taskbar features in PyQt

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