I think Mark is looking for mini-player functionality in the taskbar icon.
Brian.
Excellent observation - very well stated. So how about this alternative (option?): Do not use MC's current Taskbar Popup (a micro-sized version of the Mini-Player) and its Tooltip when mouse hovers over the MC Taskbar Icon. Instead mouse hover over Taskbar icon brings up an active full-sized Mini-Player (with the user's preset width), but auto-positioned near bottom of screen, above the Taskbar. Then have it auto-disappear when mouse moves away, just as the popup does now. Seems to me that would be perfect, since it displays whatever text info I have customized into the Player Bar at a readable size (and colorized!) and gives quick complete control (with normal size buttons to boot).
Note: I can mimic some of the desired behavior now by
clicking on hovering over the MC Taskbar icon if I do the extra initial setup of selecting, sizing, and positioning Mini-View. But I normally live inside Standard View and I want to keep it that way, not conflating with Mini-View. Also, it requires two mouse clicks
on the taskbar to get an activated Mini-View, one to activate and one to subsequently dismiss, rather than just flicking mouse motions. Ideally it would behave more like the Mini-View that pops up in MC's Display View, i.e. an activated Mini-View appears and disappears wholly through mouse motion without any extra clicks - truly well done.
Confession - I have no idea if this is possible (that is, create the
active Mini-View from just a hover) within the programming constraints of Windows taskbar icons.
The taskbar text is updated once each song. So things like [Elapsed Time] couldn't work unless we replumbed a bit.
Thanks for the info. As is, this is a disappointing limitation in terms of getting current information from the Tasbkar Popup. It limits the usefulness of the "Temporary View" of the last MC view window, which appears when the hovering mouse moves off the Taskbar Popup's control area (i.e. moves above, or left/right of the control buttons). More often than not, this "Temporary View" (whether Mini-View or Standard View, according to last MC view window) is seriously untruthful wrt current player state. A big step forward would be to make the "Temporary View" stateful, while otherwise retaining the current Taskbar Popup's clever behavior. Perhaps "replumbing" could fix this as well as add tooltip variables like [Elapsed Time].
8/15/2023 Edited for clarity.