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23Mar/08

TransparentMaker

Sko commented on the last post inquiring about a program I had a long time ago which allowed you to make various windows on your desktop transparent. It was an old-school Windows 2000 program I wrote to try out the fancy new WS_EX_LAYERED styles in Win2K:

TransparentMaker Screenshot

You could drag the cursor over a target window and adjust its transparency or make it 'always-on-top':

Transparent Calculator

It's extremely simple but it was pretty cool back in the day. I just tried it out and it still seems to work for the most part, but not as well on newer versions of Windows like Vista, due to the increased security that prevents processes from messing with each other.

An interesting unintended use of the program was that it could be used to discover saved passwords in '******' textboxes, since it displayed the result of WM_GETTEXT as you dragged the cursor over various HWNDs. Fortunately they seem to have fixed that vulnerability in XP+.

Anyway, here's a link to download it:

TransparentMaker.zip

Comments (9) Trackbacks (0)
  1. Thats a cool program…Worth a download.

    I also seem to remember you making a program a long time ago that could “lace” or “encode” two files together (i.e. lace a jpeg file into a text file). Am I correct about this or am I starting to lose my memory in my older age?

  2. Is this available in a format to use on humans instead of windows?

  3. Yep I had a steganography program that could hide arbitrary other files inside of BMP images. There are a lot of programs that do that nowadays, some good links are on the Wikipedia page:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

  4. Hmm, you want to make people transparent? Not sure I know how to do that :)

  5. thanks eric you rock!

    did you get smash brothers yet?

    I played it the other day… i kind of liked the controls on the game cube better… prob just need to get used to it.

    It didnt feel quite the same as me, you hung, kohn, and hoo sittin in your dorm room :) .

  6. Yep I played Smash Bros a bit last week. The game seems pretty good, but the controls definitely suck on the Wii. Fortunately you can hook up a GameCube controller and use that..

  7. lol, I noticed that Roy was gone too. But I was kind of happy – as soon as anybody picked Roy, then everybody had to because he was so powerful! It was so dumb..

  8. Man, that sure brings me back to the day of being a guinea pig

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Eric Faller

Eric Faller

Software Engineer at Facebook
Palo Alto, CA
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