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A long time ago (in a galaxy far far away) I wrote a simple app to display the states of the lock keys. It was badly written and lacked polish. It was named Lock State. My skills have thankfully improved since then, and since I had hit a wall on another project I decided to start updating my old apps, starting with Lock State.

This is the current test version:
(Obsolete link removed...)
I would greatly appreciate any feedback you care to provide. Use it and take not of any glitches or behavioral oddities. Please and thank you.

It needs to be able to show the status indicator without having to actually press one of the lock keys.
Maybe add a hotkey or click on/mouse over the systray icon to reveal the status indicator.
My netbook lacks such an indicator so this kind of app could be very useful;
But if you have to press a lock key to find out the status its only half as useful as it could be.

I like it though,it seems very polished.
I hope you continue to improve it.

As it is now the settings gui is displayed when the tray icon is double clicked. That is not really necessary. Would it be better to show the OSD on double click instead?

Thank you very much for responding!

Though I don't code in AHK, I still can understand and see you have come along way since the last time I used it. In Keyndicate I create a WH_KEYBOARD_LL hook, maybe that's something you could/would consider, as I guess you're now in that frame of mind to learn more.

dmg wrote:As it is now the settings gui is displayed when the tray icon is double clicked. That is not really necessary. Would it be better to show the OSD on double click instead?

Thank you very much for responding!

Thats exactly the way one would infer it work.
I thought I was doing something wrong at first.

I like the alert sound when a lock button is activated
but the status of the buttons is whats most important in my opinion
so a quick way to find out whats what.

just like you said either a double click or a single left mouse click for status
then a right mouse click for the settings window.

@guinness:
Greetings! I would be happy to hear any advice you may care to give. I googled "WH_KEYBOARD_LL" and it looks like some sort of custom keyboard hook??? I could use a hook in my code but as far as I am aware it would not change anything, unless you have some other specific changes in mind... ?

@Napiophelios:
I see your point and will look at making that change, thanks.

@Everyone:
Some other suggestions made elsewhere are making the locked state of the keys persist between runs, and fixing some GUI size and positioning issues related to DPI scaling.

Any thoughts?

I have implemented a bunch of suggestions and worked out some bugs. Here is the new version:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/vh2a3 ... te_2.0.zip
Now single clicking the tray icon shows the OSD, and double clicking brings up the settings gui. The key states and whether they are locked can be set to persist across sessions. Locking keys can be done by right clicking the OSD or by using hotkeys, i.e. Alt-CapsLock. I also added some awareness of the system DPI, in an attempt to maintain the positioning of the OSD on multiple DPI settings. Please take note of how the guis look. On some systems there was distortion and errors in control positions.

Any feedback is welcome, and thank you in advance.

Edit:
Updated the link.

Anybody have any opinions at all?

Don't currently have a specific need for a program like this so my suggestions are limited, but Lenovo sells their laptops with an annoyingly big capslock indicator so I know there's a need. How about a description and a screenshot?



Pictured above from top to bottom are the config window, the indicator buttons (which fade after 3 seconds), and tray icon.

Lock State seems ideal for laptop or smaller keyboards that don't have a clear caps lock, scroll lock, and num lock setting or a way to modify them. The indicators also pop up and you can click on them individually where most programs like this just behave as indicators. Additionally, hitting any of the buttons will bring up the window to show their current state.

Suggestions

* Maybe an ability to swap C, N, and S for "caps" "num" and "scrl"?
* If you change the color of the indicators, the tray icon stays purple. Might connect them?

BTW, see kLED

@webfork:
Thank you for responding! I actually don't have screenshots for any of the apps on my site. Not sure why, I just did not design the pages to have them...

Is the current OSD text not clear, or does it look bad in any way?
I could include icons in a few different color and let the user select... But it would complicate the script a bit. I guess I figured on most modern systems the icon would not be visible most of the time anyway.

@Checker:
Thank you. I was not aware of KLED, but I should have been. I have been a long time fan of Swire, he even helped me learn AutoHotkey when I first started.

I may be biased, but I think Lock State 2.0 is in many ways a bit nicer than KLED. KLED does not even have a GUI for the settings!

@ dmg: Thanks for voting

dmg wrote:... I was not aware of KLED ...

That's strange, because it was at the first page of the "Private"-area for more than a month.

I think a lot of users don't know that there is a "Private"-area with a lot of good applications waiting for voting (... to become public).

You can visit the "Private"-area (if you are locked-in) by entering [#] at the search-field.

I must admit the past year or so I have not spent much time here, so I have forgotten the special search codes. Thanks for pointing out KLED, and I will make an effort to brows the private section more often.