Make a portion of desktop viewable at all times

Question

I'm looking for a way to make a portion of my desktop viewable at all times. I realize that it's easy to write a script that resizes windows to accommodate this, but I'm looking for something with this added twist:
Just like you can't drag a window behind the menu bar, I'd like to create an area on the left side of my screen, about 300 pixels wide, that windows cannot move over, leaving only that portion of the desktop viewable. When moving windows around, they would just bump into this invisible edge just as they do with the menu bar.
I'm not entirely sure if this can be done in AppleScript, but I figured it would be a good place to start. Please redirect me if there is somewhere else this question would be better suited. For those wondering, I have a Geektools sidebar on my desktop that I would always like visible to me at all times.

Answer 1

The dock padding he is talking about is just a variable name he uses to indicate a distance in pixels from the side of the screen...nothing special.
Trying to get dock abilities, like menu bar abilities, is once again going to be practically impossible. If you want to do all this you will need to write your own program, or edit an open source dock like program, and then give it all the abilities you want in "geek side bar" and have it float on top etc.
As for the topic of applescripting an applet which monitors and moves windows around. To stop getting "firefox-bin" etc. Change the line
set Wins2_ to every window of application Aname_
to the line
set Wins2_ to (every window of application Aname_) who visible is true
Should get rid of all the weird hidden ones.
Finally I made some changes to an old stay open app of mine similar to this but it allows user choice (only through the source code as I didn't want to include more than 1 script) of any border to be extended and won't push your window out beyond the screen (will resize instead).
on idle
try
set horizontalDisplay to 1280
set verticalDisplay to 800
set k to 1 --user accuracy in pixels
set userPixelBorder to {100, 100, 100, 100} -- input of (left,top,right,bottom) borders
set userPixelBorder to {item 1 of userPixelBorder, item 2 of userPixelBorder, (horizontalDisplay - (item 3 of userPixelBorder)), (verticalDisplay - (item 4 of userPixelBorder))}
on error
display dialog "Fatal Initialization Error"
end try
try
tell application "System Events" to set visibleApps to name of every application process whose visible is true
repeat with i from 1 to count items of visibleApps
set appName to item i of visibleApps as text
try
set windowList to ((every window of application appName) whose visible is true)
end try
repeat with j from 1 to count items of windowList
set windowName to item j of windowList
set windowBounds to bounds of windowName
set goodCheck to {false, false, false, false}
repeat while goodCheck is not equal to {true, true, true, true}
--xaxis
if item 1 of windowBounds is less than (item 1 of userPixelBorder) - k then
set item 1 of windowBounds to ((item 1 of windowBounds) + k)
if item 3 of windowBounds is less than item 3 of userPixelBorder then set item 3 of windowBounds to ((item 3 of windowBounds) + k)
else
set item 1 of goodCheck to true
end if
if item 3 of windowBounds is greater than (item 3 of userPixelBorder) + k then
set item 3 of windowBounds to ((item 3 of windowBounds) - k)
if item 1 of windowBounds is greater than item 1 of userPixelBorder then set item 1 of windowBounds to ((item 1 of windowBounds) - k)
else
set item 3 of goodCheck to true
end if
--yaxis
if item 2 of windowBounds is less than (item 2 of userPixelBorder) - k then
set item 2 of windowBounds to ((item 2 of windowBounds) + k)
if item 4 of windowBounds is less than item 4 of userPixelBorder then set item 4 of windowBounds to ((item 4 of windowBounds) + k)
else
set item 2 of goodCheck to true
end if
if item 4 of windowBounds is greater than (item 4 of userPixelBorder) + k then
set item 4 of windowBounds to ((item 4 of windowBounds) - k)
if item 2 of windowBounds is greater than item 2 of userPixelBorder then set item 2 of windowBounds to ((item 2 of windowBounds) - k)
else
set item 4 of goodCheck to true
end if
end repeat
set bounds of windowName to {item 1 of windowBounds, item 2 of windowBounds, item 3 of windowBounds, item 4 of windowBounds}
end repeat
end repeat
end try
return 1 --runs every second
end idle
It still leaks memory but I remember it running for days fine when it was done up all pretty in xcode broken into a couple of scripts.
One more thing as a solution to memory problems is if you want to script a key combination that clears a strip of the desktop sort of like expose. I edited that unreadable code for this one.
set Wdisp_ to 1280 --width of display
set Pixnum_ to 300 --number of pixels to clear from the left side
set Wins1_ to {}
tell application "System Events" to set A_ to name of every application process whose visible is true
repeat with i_ from 1 to count items of A_
set Aname_ to item i_ of A_
try
set Wins2_ to every window of application Aname_
repeat with j_ from 1 to count items of Wins2_
set end of Wins1_ to item j_ of Wins2_
end repeat
end try
end repeat
repeat with i_ from 1 to count items of Wins1_
set W2_ to item i_ of Wins1_
try
set B_ to bounds of W2_
set LB_ to item 1 of B_
if LB_ < Pixnum_ then
set RB_ to (item 3 of B_) + (Pixnum_ - LB_)
if RB_ is less than Wdisp_ then
set bounds of W2_ to {Pixnum_, (item 2 of B_), (RB_), (item 4 of B_)}
else
set bounds of W2_ to {Pixnum_, (item 2 of B_), (Wdisp_), (item 4 of B_)}
end if
end if
end try
end repeat
Enjoy