taskbar flashing

I'm writing an internal messaging system for a company, but I need some help on something...

Well, some websites, like chat rooms make the taskbar icon in Win XP flash until you click on it. I need a way of grabbing peoples attention so I thought that would work, but another problem is that people are using Win 98, Win 2000 and ME as well so I'm not sure what to do

Does anyone know a bit of code (javascript???) to make the button flash at least in XP?

thanks,
comp

I seriously doubt that JavaScript can make the taskbar buttons flash. Are you sure that the chatrooms you're talking about aren't opening Java applets that let you chat?

i don't really care what it is but I the chat room was just an iframe that refreshed every second or so...

can you give an example of a site that has a chatroom that makes the browser act in such a way? It would make it pretty easy to figure out what technology is being used.

umm. not of the top of my head. i found this some time ago.

i'm have a look around and post if i can

Making the task bar flash is actually something they did in XP instead of switching focus. When a window requests focus it will flash the title bar of the window in the taskbar and will leave it highlighted.

If you use the normal window.focus() function it will cause the window to get focus under windows 98/me. Under XP it will simply flash

Great - that's one of those things that always pissed me off about Windoze. I'll be sitting here doing something and a window will decide it's done doing something, take focus, and all my typing will frag something in the new window. A great example of this is when some window pops up a dialog asking me to make a choice I wasn't expecting. My typing, obviously, includes hittingthespacebarnowandthen. Spacebar executes buttons. Buttons usually have default selections highlighted. If I didn't want the default, too freakin' bad - too late now that I hit the space bar to add a space to the text I was previously trying to type. What's the point of a (make-believe) mutli-tasking environment if you can't trust it to let you multi-task?

You can disable/enable this behaviour with "Tweak UI" (from MS Powertoys). The option is called "Prevent applications from stealing focus". And it can also be changed in a registry setting.

But it has to be done on all XP machines and can only be done globally, not for this specific application.

Other than that, you could tell your customers: "It´s not a bug - it´s a feature. Blame Microsoft, not me..."

Is switching to an application programming language like Delphi or C an option?