Is it possible to write this program on C?

At the moment I'm a statistcs graduation student with the basics of C programming knowledge.

The idea is basically a program wich running in the "background" can get a combination of keys (let's say something like alt+8), and whenever the combination is pressed, a chronometer starts running from a certain time to 0. But what makes me think this is really unlikely, I need the time counter to be shown over other program, and in a certain region of the screen.

As an example, assume you're downloading a file and the download will finish in 25 minutes, now assume you're using a full screen application, then you should be able to know when the download is finished without closing/minimizing the full screen program.

I know it seems useless at first, but sometimes it'd make some stuff easier to have such a program and at the same time, learning about new librearies is always helpful.

By the way, if it's not possible in C, any other language I could try?

You might want to state which operating system the code will run on.

Windows 7 64bits.

GNU GCC Compiler.

Let's start with the basics.
Which operating system and compiler do you have?

The choice of programming language is somewhat irrelevant.

If your OS/GUI/Window manager doesn't allow popup notifications over full-screen windows, then you're pretty much stuck regardless of which language you choose.

As I said, I plan on running it on a Windows 7 64 bits.

At this moment the compiler I have is minGW32-gcc, but I can use other compilers/OS in case these become a problem.

i'd google this as a starting point. the problem with C is that it doesn't really have any graphics header files. there's a graph.h but i dont know of any for pop-up windows.


can't the task-bar remain on top of whatever you run? if so, that makes me thing that this is definitely possible in windows. heck, take league of legends as an example. when the game first starts, and all the summoners connect, theres an emblem in the middle of the screen. even if you start typing in a word document, or browsing a web page, it sits there right in the middle of the screen.

As mentioned, this is not a C issue at all, it is specific to the OS windows manager. You are going to have to look in OS specific GUI design forums unless you get lucky here.

I'll bet it's a trivial tcl program.
Implementation details to be determined.

In Windows you can assign a keyboard short-cut to any executable file via the "Shortcut" tab of the file's properties dialog (right-click, select Properties).

Any GUI application main window or dialog box can have its window attributes set to "always-on-top", and such a GUI application can indeed be programmed in C. MinGW is a somewhat primitive tool however for GUI programming - you can write code to the Win32 API, but it has no visual design tools or even a simple resource editor. You could use a higherlevel GUI framework such as Qt or wxWidgets, but those are C++ as are most GUI frameworks, so C++ might be a better option in any case.

Another option is C#. The .NET framework and Windows Forms is very easy to work with and the tools are free.

See Visual Studio 2012 Express Edition A complete suite for C#, C, C++ and more.


When you say "full screen", do you mean full screen or simply a maximised window? Even "always on top" may not work on some full-screen apps I imagine. Why don't you just get a cooking timer or use an app on your mobile phone? It probably already has one.