Screen Find – Seeing the Wood in the Trees

I hope you have a nice big screen – or several of them. Nice huh?

Well all this real estate comes with a price. Some times the screens can hold so much information it is hard to find what you are looking for. Would it not be nice to be able to search for the word you are looking for in a huge list of dense text?

Sure almost every app has search, but can you search the dialogue boxes, the drop down menus, the image of a poster?

So why not have a system wide special key combo that triggered a find dialogue box. Type in ‘comment’ and the screens are captured, OCR’ed and then if the text is found an overlay highlight shows you where the word is.

OCR

Looks like Tesseract from Google is good and also in C++.

Global Keystroke Capture

Basically this is a key logger, which sounds like other protection SW would complain and get in the way. But others have thought of that and there is a Windows OS method for getting special key combos: RegisterHotKey. Win-F anyone?

Full Screen Overlay

This is very OS specific and requires the mouse etc to ‘click through’ the overlay window.

Here is a C# application that must do all the parts that are needed. OnTopReplica.

However another solution might be to temporarily create alpha windows to attract your attention and then dismiss them.

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