virtualbox.org

I'm sure this has been suggested to death, but I'm doing it again.

Seamless mode needs to be improved, I think, with these abilities. I know this is far from trivial, and maybe it's being looked into... and just a simple "we'd like to do this someday" would be cool, too.

- Don't show me the whole VM taskbar. Show me running programs, as individual, named items in my host's taskbar. Put a program's system tray icon in my host's system tray, too.
- Allow me to start an individual program in the VM in this mode by activating a launcher in my host OS.
- Strip the VM's window decorations off the program's window and use the decorations from the host OS instead.
- Don't make me use network drives to share folders. Allow me to define specific folders that are like symlinks from the guest to the host's filesystem, and allow me to turn any folder in the guest into this kind of link.
- Make cappuccino.

Maybe it's worth mentioning why these would be meaningful improvements.

Mainly, I have a problem with calling it "seamless" mode when really all you're doing is dropping out the Desktop layer. If I have a few windows from my Guest OS running, and a few native ones from my Host OS running, "Seamless" should mean I can manage and switch between all these windows... well, seamlessly. But no. If I click on a single window from the Guest OS, all of the Guest OS windows and the guest's taskbar are brought to the front, because they are all actually still a single window, regardless of the trickery of dropping out the desktop background. This doesn't work right. I should be able to select just a single one. I should also have an individual representation of each Guest application sitting right where the rest of my programs are, because forcing me to use another taskbar defeats the purpose of "Seamless" integration. The Guest's taskbar is always being covered up by native windows, there's no way to reserve space on my Host's desktop for it, and it forces the user to be familiar with two separate desktop, window management, and menu systems that have no integration.

Really all you get by using Seamless Mode now is Full-Screen Mode where you can see through the desktop background. The way Microsoft is doing it with "Windows XP Mode" in Windows 7 using Windows Virtual PC is far superior to what VirtualBox is capable of right now. I just don't have that option because I hate using Windows.

How about adding to the mini toolbar a drop-down list where the current machine name is displayed, something like



Then you can switch between the running machines with a single click!

Anyone up for the challenge?

Regards

Cilliers

Cilliers: Good idea. Opened Wish #8704

Yes, vexati0n's ideas are exactly what I am looking for. I've found some interesting ideas on how to do some of this on this thread as well: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=38125

Does anybody know if there has been further progress along these lines? I am very interested in making this happen and would be happy to contribute. Anybody have any ideas or suggestions?

And to be clear, it is the original idea on this thread that are interesting: embedding guest apps into the host desktop such that they seem completely at him and integrated...

Thoughts?